[Hornbeam]

I remember them both. Only a child in '47 but I still remember the snow drifts and blizzards. School milk was frozen in the bottles. We broke the glass and held the frozen milk in our hands like lollipops. No central heating of course and your breath froze on the inside glass of your bedroom widows. Getting out of bed was agony! Even at school we only had one coke burning stove in a classroom. The ink froze in the ink wells overnight! Vehicles were totally buried in snowdrifts and I'm pretty certain that trains got hopelessly stuck and buried too.

I962/3 lasted longer. I seem to remember that it started to snow in November and lasted until March. Snow came up to the bedroom windows of my parents' north London house. We just got on with life, but it was hard and even the kids got tired of the snow. It was deep and hard and permanent. Ponds and lakes froze hard and so did water pipes. Many houses had great bursts of spectacular icicles on the outside from burst pipes. I was in the Army and spent most of that winter digging people and vehicles out of enormous snowdrifts much higher than your head.