Another dose of snow & freezing temperatures, (though once again we are escaping the worst) has made me think once more of the gratitude & admiration I owe to my parents for how they coped with the winter of 1947.
I have three very specific memories of my father from that time, all of which involve a sledge.
In the first I am standing on something to look out of the kitchen window as he comes down the lane, the surface of which was a lot higher than usual because of all the packed snow, pulling a sledge on which rested two or three bags of coal – goodness knows how far he might have had to go to get them.
On another day I was out in the garden watching him do the same, only this time his cargo was the District Nurse, a jolly lady, in her uniform of brown gabardine coat & matching hat.
In the third flashback the sledge is outside the kitchen door, mummy has just sat on it with her legs stretched out in front & I, laughing with delight, am clambering to sit in front of her; we were all laughing as her arms came round to hold me on & we moved off.
The odd thing about this memory is that my (nearly new) baby sister does not figure in it at all. I suppose she might have been wrapped under the front of mummy’s coat, or even conceivably in some sort of sling carried by daddy. It is even not inconceivable, in those times, that she was just at home alone in her cot. Most likely, I expect she had been taken round to a neighbour or the next door neighbour had come to sit with her.
I have absolutely no idea of where it was that we went.
And I find it disconcerting to realise that you have to be at least 65 years old to have any personal memories of that year.
