60 Years Ago Today - Remembering the Big Freeze - From My Book, 'In The Blink Of An Eye: Growing Up In Rural Oxfordshire'

The winter of 1962–63 was something else. It deserves a special mention. It came almost as a punctuation mark for me as my life was about to change when I left school and entered the working class in Oxford.

I was the village’s provider of Sunday newspapers! I felt I had an important job to do because without me, no–one would have anything to read on Sunday mornings! It was my sacred duty to get the Sunday newspapers delivered!

So, on Sunday, 30th December 1962 I got up as usual to go to Charlbury to buy my 60 newspapers for which I charged a penny each for delivery. I noticed there had been some snow and, unusually, the snow on the lower window frame on the back door seemed to be three or four inches up the glass.

The winter had actually started a few days earlier with snow on Boxing Day, the next best thing to a white Christmas, but it was nothing more than the usual few inches which everyone assumed would be gone in a few days. How wrong we were, as I was about to find out!

I opened the door to go to the outside toilet. A pile of snow fell into the kitchen. The back yard was full of snow, literally. It wasn't just piled up on the edges of the windowpanes, but against the door itself.

I went out of the front door to find the world had changed beyond recognition! The Lane was full of snow! A snowdrift came straight off our garage roof, across the front garden, over the garden wall and up to the wall of the house opposite. It was deeper by far than my, by now, 5 feet 10 inches.

And the snow was still falling thick and fast, driven by a gale-force wind! Southern England was in the grip of a major blizzard not seen since 1947 and probably much earlier. Bitterly cold Arctic winds drove the dry, powdery snow into every hollow and piled it up until the hollow was full, then moved on to fill the next, deeper hollow, until the countryside was a smooth as plastered wall.

But the newspapers had to get through!

So, donning wellies with two pairs of thick socks, jumpers, overcoat, scarves – one over my head and over my mouth, another round my neck twice – a balaclava helmet and two pairs of gloves, I slung my paper bag, made out of an old hessian corn sack, over my shoulder and set out. It was a strange landscape, but Main Road wasn’t too deeply covered. There were no car tracks!

I trudged up through the village to just beyond the Finstock turn, marveling at the deepening drifts, and even stopping to help a man trying to get his car out of his drive. He wasn't going to get very far. It was there I met our neighbour’s son-in-law walking over from Charlbury to check on her.

“You goin’ to get yer papers?” he asked incredulously.

“Well, Dad can’t drive me so I’m walkin’!” I explained.

“Well, turn round and go ‘ome” he said. “No–one’s goin’ to get their papers today!”

“Is it that bad?”

“Corse it is! Even the trains ent runnin! Nothin’s movin’ anywhere.”

So, I turned round and walked ‘ome with him, and had a cup of hot soup made out of the remains of the Christmas goose. The village was totally shut off! For the first time on my watch, the Sunday newspapers had not been delivered.

We dug out the lane down to The Green so people could get to Wally Scarrot's shop, but the shop couldn’t get supplies in and was beginning to run down as a village shop anyway, as people got cars and could shop at the new supermarkets in Witney and Chipping Norton. The bakery had ceased to operate several years earlier. It was a time for community action!

The word was passed from door to door, “Mrs. Creece says, if you can get your orders to the farm by 10 o’clock, one of the men will drive a tractor across the fields to the Co–op in Charlbury.” We got our groceries delivered to the farm. We were told to collect all the free milk we wanted from the farm as the dairy cows still had to be milked but nothing could be got out. Churns of milk were simply poured away.

One council worker who normally drove a snow plough when needed, tried to keep the road between Fawler (and Finstock, so through to Witney) open with a mechanical digger but the road filled in behind him as he dug his way through. He spent most of one day just trying to open the road for a half–mile stretch where the snow blew down across flat fields to fill up the road to the level of the hedges either side. In the end, he gave up, cut a hole in the hedge at either end of the stretch and made a makeshift road across the field. Essential vehicles were towed across the field.

One local doctor did his house calls on skis.

But the tobogganing was good until we had to go back to school - if the school busses were running and school was open.

Making the most of the snow.
(From the illustrated edition)

Illustration: Catherine Webber-Hounslow

The winter dragged on with perpetual frost day after day. Water pipes froze underground, and tractor batteries were pressed into service to try to heat them up to thaw them out. Tea was made with boiled snow.

And I just had to get to Charlbury every evening to see my girlfriend! I walked through ice gorges with deeply rutted roads and saw wonderful meteor showers in the brilliantly clear sky. 1963 was not only the coldest but the sunniest winter on record.

Then we had the ice storm!

A blast of warm moist air hit the cold air over the snowfields of England and its water condensed out as what would have been torrential rain, only to freeze solid into frozen raindrops as it hit the cold air below and spread a crust of ice beads about two inches thick on top of the deep snow.

Then is snowed and snowed hard as another blizzard hit!

And the snow now had a smooth skating rink to blow across and every snowflake came pouring across the smooth fields and filled up the roads again, this time to the top of the ice gorge. I decided I was going to go to Charlbury that evening because I had a warm and cosy girlfriend waiting.

I reached the ice gorge to see a complete white blanket of snow pouring off the top of the drifts, swirling in the driving wind, so I put my head down and ran through it. It went on for a hundred yards or more and I emerged from the other side white with snow on my right–hand side, I wiped the snow off my face and hurried on.

My girlfriend’s house had a lovely fire going and her brave hero had got through the blizzard. My wet coat was hanging to dry, and my wellies were by the back door. And my right ear felt funny! I touched it. It was encased in ice! My ear was frozen! An ear–shaped piece of ice lay in my hand and within seconds bemusement turned to misery as it felt as though my ear was held in a vice! I fell to my knees almost screaming with pain for several minutes until the pain subsided and my ear turned a shade of crimson and throbbed.

The next day it looked like it had been shut in a vice as it went purple. I narrowly avoided frostbite but the edge of my ear pealed and became corrugated. It still is!

For a while the ice storm made walking over the drifts easier as it was thick enough to bear the weight of an adult, but walking was still treacherous as the slightest slope became a downward slide with nothing to stop you until you reached the bottom – whatever and wherever the bottom was.

Then it began to thaw briefly, and the ice crust thinned and lost strength. It was a gamble now. Did you walk over the snowdrift on the ice and risk your foot suddenly going through up to your groin, leaving you to struggle out with a welly full of snow, often needing to crawl and with your other leg likely to go through too, or did you walk along the rutted and treacherous road (or what had been the road)?

Tobogganing became a lethal pastime! A toboggan would skim across the ice crust with no hope of control by dragging a foot in the snow to make it turn. It went downhill, gathering speed with almost no resistance until it either hit an uphill stretch or came to a natural stop after a half a mile or so. Using a toboggan on the hill over the downstream water meadow became dangerous as there was a serious risk of going right across the meadow into the river. The Evenlode was frozen over for the only time in living memory, but coming over the high bank on a toboggan was definitely to be avoided.

One of my school friends came to school one day with his face covered in lacerations. His toboggan had dug a runner into the snow throwing him face–first into the ice crust. “It was like going into a glass window,” he explained.

1963 was ‘O’–level year for us Spendlove School kids. We were the first Secondary School children in Oxfordshire to be allowed to stay on into the Fifth Form to take ‘O’–levels and I had pleaded with my parents to let me stay on at school. There was no way I was going to miss any more school than I absolutely had to, so I walked.

On one occasion I walked through freezing fog, arriving with the front of my hair and the fur on my fur–collard coat white with hoarfrost, to discover that almost no–one else had turned up. We spent the morning in the assembly hall, had a ‘school dinner’ of bread and cheese, then went home. None of the school busses had run – which is why I walked in the first place.

And the winter dragged on.

Almost three months with frosts every night and below zero temperatures most days too, and a thaw never materialising until late March. When the snow finally went, the grass was yellow. The last to go was that piled up at the sides of the road where it had been since late December.

And during that winter we fell in love with the Beatles and Beatlemania gripped Britain and America. In 1963 British groups dominated the US charts and England began to swing. Life was good! I bought myself and my girlfriend a transistor radio and I had music as I walked over to Charlbury and back.

Gradually, winter gave way to spring. Violets appeared in the woods and hedgerows along the roadside, followed by primroses and cowslips in the meadows. What a delight to see a mass of little purple violets set amongst their bright green leaves! Can there be any better symbol of spring? Oh, what a heady scent too! To bury your nose deep into a bunch of freshly-picked violets is only bettered, if at all, by burying your nose into a bunch of freshly-picked primroses or cowslips. From as earlier as I could remember, I always took a bunch of flowers home to Mum if I found some, probably harking back to the days when she taught me the names of the wildflowers, butterflies and birds as we went for a walk along North Leigh Lane.

Suddenly, the countryside seemed to wake up and sprout green everywhere. The hawthorns in the hedges and the cow parley on the roadside; the spathes of cuckoopint and annoyingly, the fresh shoots of stinging nettle which would soon shut us out of patches of countryside that we had been able to walk through in winter, burst forth in great profusion, giving the countryside a clean, freshly washed look.

Gathering food for my pet guinea-pig became a pleasure after the difficulty finding enough fresh grass in the winter, unless I left it too late and grabbed a handful of nettles in the dark.

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