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Snowed under
When
you’re not that steady on your feet, the
last thing you hope for is snow, but
when the first few flakes fell around
the house in January, I smiled, my mind
went way way back to when I was just a
young lad, and that snow meant fun and
can still clearly remember being stuck
at school back in the winter of 1963
after a snow blizzard blocked us in and
that my mum took ages to rescue me from
the local parish hall that we had all
been taken to. I also remember Dad
taking me and my sister tobogganing on a
hill that ended in a stream, that is if
you didn’t stop in time, happy memories
indeed and I thought that as in previous
years the snow would be all melted and
gone by tea time
Wrong,
the snow didn’t stop this time, and lay
deeper and deeper as the day wore on,
only our little dog Buddy enjoyed it,
rushing around the garden here and there
at full speed, and eating the stuff, he
sees snow as free food, the daft dog,
and was making the most of it as you can
imagine. Well, as you know the thaw
didn’t come that day, and by the end of
the day I realised, like many of us, we
were marooned.
Living on
a hill does have its advantages
sometimes but any are certainly
outweighed by being stuck, fortunately
Karen is fit, and still had to walk the
dog, so she ventured down and found that
all the main roads at the bottom of the
hill were running with only minor
problems so all we had to do was to dig
the car out, but as we had enough food
in the house for a few days, we didn’t
bother, mistake.
It seemed the only cars
that were coping with our hill were
these cursed 4X4 monsters, you know
these ones we all criticise throughout
the rest of the year, flipping Chelsea
tractors, they were making it up and
down without too much of a problem, and
as luck would have it, my mate has one
of these, and after a couple of days he
came up to rescue me, referring to his
4X4 as thunderbird two. So at least I
could get down the hill and see the
world again, but our cars were still
stuck, and it wasn’t until the Saturday
that the road was just clear enough to
drive up and down so a few good friends
struggled up the hill with their spades
and dug my buried car out, well that
took them one and a half hours as the
snow had now turned to ice and had made
the task far more difficult for them,
but with plenty of tea and coffee the
job was complete and we could venture
out again after five long days marooned.
Robin
Stephens. Pictures below. |
