The Chaplain Had Real Skates. Everyone Else Had Shoes.

With the hockey pitches frozen, games were off and runs were on. The favourite cross-country was the Three Bridges. The first bridge carried the road over the railway towards Cromer. The second was the next bridge on the line to Sheringham. “What the third bridge was nobody knew.”

I have been on school runs organised with less information, but not many.

On the route was a pond, and the pond froze. Very few boys owned skates. The chaplain, the Revd D. C. Argyle, known as Dubby, did, and Mason remembers him gliding elegantly round the pond on real skates while the rest of them slid about in their school shoes. A clearer picture of the staff–pupil relationship has never been painted.

The boys also built an igloo. It never got as far as a roof, because snowball fights turned out to be more entertaining to most boys than the engineering. Sixty years on, Mason writes that he wishes they had tried.

Elsewhere the freeze was less festive. Lydney Grammar School’s magazine for 1962–63 records pupils struggling to get in from January to March, some of them, the editors suggest, “to their delight perhaps” not getting in at all. A second-former from St Briavels describes the school bus rarely reaching the village, until two taxis were hired to take eight pupils to Bream to catch a different bus.

When the snow reached us in February 2018, I had a plan: an igloo, with a roof. I had watched a video. I had a plastic storage box for moulding blocks. By eleven we had a circle. By twenty past, the youngest had thrown a snowball at his sister. By noon it was a fort, and it has been a fort in family memory ever since. Nobody mentions the roof.

My husband, who took no part in the igloo, took the children on a walk he named the Three Bridges. They were gone two hours. There are two bridges in our town.

What the third bridge was, nobody knew.