Dave,

This story resonates with me on three points.
I am a little bit younger than you so I was only two in 1963 but my parents always talk about that winter and the fact that the snow piled up to the windows on the upstairs rooms. We lived in Oldham near Manchester.

We lived in a house that was two up and two down with a coal fire in the lounge and no other heating and again while I was too young to remember my parents talk about having half of inch of ice on the inside of the windows and leaving me outside in a pram on the street to get fresh air in the middle of winter.

I too remember going to school in the snow in shorts. What sort of mind would make kids do that sort of thing. I was brought up Catholic and always thought it was a remnant of the Spanish Inquisition.

We may have gotten softer but no-one would go back to it by choice.

Cheers

Paul

You are making me feel old - I can remember the winter of '47. By January '63 I was 8 months into pregnancy with my first child - it was hell trying to waddle around on the ice.

Ah Dave - I remember both that winter and the shorts issue. I was a bit older than you and could wear long trousers - but recall that great moment of manhood when I could put away shorts. Thank God when I went to Harrow I was tall enough to be able to avoid the dreaded "Bum Freezer" - boys under a certain height had to wear an Eton Collar and a short jacket on Sunday when the rest of us wore tails!

What a winter that was - we went skiing on a local hill in the "alps" of Hindhead, Surrey. Most of the loos in the school were unheated. No wonder constipation was a on going issue - leading to generous dosing of cod liver oil.

Oh the good old days. But I did love the high fat food and still do

I live in the Canadian prairies and took great delight in telling my kids when they were whining about having to play outside in the winter that I "walked barefoot 2 miles to school every day, uphill both ways, carrying my younger brother on my back". They actually believed me up to a certain age...the truth is though, that the Brits exported Twiggy to us in the late 60's (when I was in fact walking a mile each way to school), and we all adopted her impossibly short mini skirts. My classmates and I would compare the length of time that it took for our legs to regain feeling - an hour was not unusual. Interesting, hmm, we experienced the same pain - your motivation was avoiding greater pain, mine was entirely self-imposed. If you can just figure out what motivates people, you can get them to do just about anything...

Susan

I remember that Winter too (although I was a bit younger). Fortunately I had no school uniform at that age but early 1960s social constraints meant that little girls wore a skirt or a dress and shoes and socks. And I wore wellies for the 1.5 mile trudge through the snow to school. They are not great for walking either in deep snow or on ice, especially up and down steep Pennine hillsides...

I still remember the winter of 1969 as a 13 year old American school boy on RAF Cranwell trying to figure out why the house we lived in only had a something called a coke-fire in the kitchen. I couldn't imagine why my parents had brought me to this place with no heat. It snowed heavily every winter up in Lincolnshire for the next 4 years. We had come from south Georgia.

Bill
Hong Kong
(where it never really gets too cold)