Confinement provokes very different feelings depending on the circumstances. Deprived of freedom and basic provisions causes people to react in surprisingly diverse, and not always positive, ways. In our lifetime lots of us may have already experienced some kind of confinement due to a hospital stay, illness, or even adverse weather conditions, such as those I experienced as a child.
January 1982, it was the harshest winter we’d ever known. I was twelve years old at the time and we lived in a traditional thatched cottage in the south west of England. Tumbling out of bed one morning I noticed that the light through my bedroom curtains was different, sharper, brighter. It was silent, no cars, no voices.
Running down the spiral staircase I peered through the kitchen window and the stark whiteness hurt my eyes. The snow was piled up against the back door, a powdery drift at least a metre high. Because the village was in a valley the school bus couldn’t come to collect us. In fact nobody could enter or leave the village, we were stuck.
The men in the village climbed onto tractors and went to the farms to collect milk and deliver it to the villagers. We all stood at our doors and windows waving and cheering them, as if they were off to war, they were our heroes and all the families pulled together in that time of need. The women in the village queued at the local store to buy basic provisions. A power cut forced us to toast our bread on the open fire and heat baked beans in an old pan. We lit candles and huddled around the fireplace for warmth. The water in our garden well was frozen solid.
For us it was an adventure, made even better by the fact that we had no lessons for a week. We were oblivious to any hardship and nobody complained. Everybody just did their best in the circumstances. We dusted off our sledges, squirted washing-up soap onto the metal runners. Wrapped in our hand-knitted scarves, we slipped and clambered up the steep hill behind the farm. We were reckless as we zoomed down the hill, sometimes two or three of us clinging together on the same sledge. Those of us who went too fast and failed to brake ended up in the stream, soaking wet and shivering. Bones were fractured and clothes torn. But we didn’t mind, we were trapped in our winter wonderland. We were happy and we knew, as the snow started slowly to turn into sludge, that things would get back to normal soon.
A lovely image of a Britain of my youth.. which i doubt i will see again.. Knitted scarfs, baked beans,the milkman…. Or milktractor. Did you make a snowman and stick a carrot in the nose?
Very nice. I remember loving those kinds of snowstorms as a kid. There was the feeling in the U. S. of bring a pioneer, gathering around the fireplace and being forced to make homemade food from scratch instead of the newly available awful frozen dinners my mother preferred.
being a pioneer, not “bring”