Ever Caught A Warm? (3 December 1976)
One of the Met Office’s cold northerly airstreams is passing though these parts at the time of writing.
We had a marvellously hot and dry summer, followed by a period of so much rain that reservoirs which were said to be at crisis levels have been refilled in record time and ground that was bare is now six or seven inches deep in thick, lush grass.
But does the long, hot summer mean “We shall have to pay for it” as old folks used to say – with a long hard winter?
Looking back on our youth we fancy that every summer was full of strawberries and cream and every winter full of snow fights and skating on the canal. The weather in more recent years, in which it has sometimes been as cold in May as at Christmas, has therefore given us the feeling that somehow the seasons have become mixed up.
Weather forecasting is tricky. Before we had our own forecasting outfit, weather forecasts were sent from America. They were the first regular forecasts we had. Before that we relied on old sayings. One farmer was worried by the American connection. On one occasion he said: “When God Almighty sent the weather we had it reasonable, but now the Americans are sending it, it is all wet and bad.” Eventually, that farmer went bankrupt and the men who had worked for him were sure it was a judgement on him for such an abominable reference to the Almighty, although someone else was writing at the time:
“The rain it raineth every day upon the just and the unjust fella,
But more upon the just because the unjust had got the just’s umbrella.”
Actually, what will happen this winter is anybody’s guess. But if you want mine, it is that we are now going through a period of years very similar to those which followed 1917. There was then a series of warm winters, but the warmth continued throughout the year and 1921 was the hottest summer of this century up to 1976.
Yet you have to be prepared for anything in this country. Old people knew it and still do. If you look at photographs taken in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, you will be struck by the amount of clothing people wore. This was only partly due to fashion.
Still less was it due to so-called Victorian prudery. Paintings from Georgian and earlier times show that same knowledge of our forebears that it was better to be too warm than too cold. In fact, we still speak of catching a cold, never of catching a warm.
In those days there were no sophisticated space-heating aids. Draughts abounded everywhere and you could be cosier in a cottage than in a palace. At bedtime a couple of hot bricks wrapped in a bit of old blanket could be as effective as the most ornate warming pan. And those four-poster beds were not a foible of the gentry; they were a necessity, for, with the curtains drawn, they created a room within a room.
Yesterday my daily paper had a letter from a woman who said that this winter she would be thinking with envy of the “poor” (her quotation marks) who would be able to keep warm with the help of the electricity subsidy. Her husband had a reasonable salary but they could not afford to run their electric central heating. Until the children came home from school, she froze in an unheated house and they had to rely on paraffin heaters in the evenings.
Well, well. Apart from her reference to the poor, it is just possible to sympathise with this writer. Maybe she had no choice but to live in one of those silly open-plan affairs which should never be built in this country except by order of those with a mint of money to pay for the essential central heating. Central heating is a luxury, but today’s architects and builders seem determined to turn it into a necessity. Yet they can hardly be blamed if that is the popular demand, unthinking as that demand might be.
The demand seems to me to be for a life-style which in some respects is alien to these climes. People dress as though they expect to step from a heated house into a heated car and thence into a heated office or factory in weather which indicates they would be more suitably dressed like farmers. And in bed they scorn to wear pyjamas, prefering(sic) to “bodify” the sheets and a continental quilt instead.
All this is just crazy for the vast majority. We shall just have to hope we don’t have a winter like 1946-47. Electricity and all other fuels had then to be rationed. Long johns, long coms, spencers, pullovers over and under the shirt were the order of the day.
Yet we were only doing temporarily what our grandfathers and grandmothers had always done. In the present state of the economy who is to say it will not happen again?
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