I was born in that terrible year of nineteen-sixty-two after the build up to nuclear Armageddon, when my parents’ generation had decided sensibly to pull back from the brink and nature then reminded us of its potential with that awful, awful winter, where once I had been delivered my father had to stop and dig the car out of snow-drifts three times on the way home.
The wallpaper of your childhood is the weather; that stereotype of the golden days of summer during your school holidays. The gamble of taking a coat to school and being caught in spring showers on the way home, running in wet to a scolding. Scuffing your way through great piles of leaves in the autumn to the curses of municipal workers.
And Winter.
The cold has never frightened me; the delicious thrill of it until you start to warm up, the crisp air on your face and the numb fingers, the variability of snow, fog, rain and blindingly brilliant clear days. It's always been my favourite season and unless you have lived away from Britain you never realise just how lucky you are to watch nature grow, die and regenerate itself in its annual transformation.
A small boy, your body becoming regulated to that natural clock, you move to the Bahamas for a few years in those pinched mean Sixties, from a Britain at long, long last emerging from its post WWII recuperation. School uniforms, deference, bland, traditionally inoffensive food, and an ethnically homogenous society and then suddenly its sunshine all year round with exotic faces and food. But still stiffly starched, crisp school uniforms. Always warm, but never too hot for a boy exploring like Robinson Crusoe on his tropical island, in and out of the heat, running in a pair of shorts.
I didn't own a single coat.
And then home. They say you never realise what you've missed until it's gone. That first winter we all froze and were glued, shivering, to a fire that must have burned as much coal as Battersea power station, but gradually the resilience of youth returned as we ventured outside. I got a coat.
Long days in dull classes, your face pressed to the window, looking longingly at the sun, wishing you were in it.
Britain in the Seventies was odd. I can remember freezing and boiling in schools with erratic boilers and badly sealed windows. I can remember the winter of 1976, being sent home because it was too cold for school, but what I mostly remember is sunshine and cigarettes, tight t-shirts and punk music. Those hazy teenage years, cold kisses in the winter and torrid summers under the trees in park knowing you had to get your pwtching in before autumn and the return to propriety and education.
College and sports, athletics and rugby; the world turns and the seasons rise and fall, each bringing its own activity, keenly looked for, the highs and lows, wins and losses and then one last summer of freedom back in the sunshine when you discover Greece.
Do you know what a trireme is? Its bloody hard work is what it is, but the sky. No blue like the blue of a Greek sky; and the sea....
'And grey-eyed Athena sent them a strong west wind, singing sweetly over the wine-dark sea....'
Returning brown as a nut, hard as teak to the grey, drizzly canyons of Croydon and London before disappointing my mother (again) by throwing in a cushy Civil Service job to 'run away and join the circus' at the airport and eighteen glorious years as a Dispatcher and lucky to have as my 'ramp-daddy' Len Aherne. Big and mean, with one of those ginger moustaches you only ever saw on NCO's in the seventies and eighties. Think James Cosmo, but hard.
For some reason he liked me and did more than show me the ropes, he taught me.
'The whole purpose of your life may be to serve as a warning to others'.
'Look after your kit and your kit will look after you'.
'Pay attention pretty boy, you learn more by standing still and watching'.
'Eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, and go to the bog when you can'.
'Be like your boots. Big, practical and with a thin veneer of polish'.
'You're nobody until you've earned a name'.
He taught me about the weather having spent his life outdoors in it. How you can smell rain coming. You really can. The mist that would burn off by ten or the thick fog that chilled your soul and sit around like an unwelcome guest doing nothing for days. And snow; the flat grey clouds with a slight luminescent yellow tinge and what would drop a few flakes and what would bury the world like Fimbulwinter. And what to do when it came.
Mostly what you did was run around like small boys having snowball fights in between the Jumbo jets looking up at the warm heated lounges and the passengers looking back out at you and knowing you had the best deal, the laughter, shrieks and curses muffled by the deadening blanket and low sky when nature had had enough of colour and buried the world in white.
The crisp spring mornings in your shirt sleeves in the dawn and watching the sun rise over the horizon bleeding light into the world, like a schoolboy again cursing in the rain as the gamble of not taking your anorak out didn’t pay off.
Rain. Rain in the summer, raining so hard you could see it bounce off the ground; the smell of petrichor as the dusty, thirsty concrete drank it greedily before its thirst slaked it boiled away in the heat and you’d bake again in the heat, your tongue hanging out like a dog.
And then the world turned, the seasons have risen and fallen and now, now in the Autumn of life, now it’s long days in dull offices, your face pressed to the window, looking longingly at the sun, wishing you were in it, but at least remembering you had been. And in an office of noisy, chattering clerk’s desperately showing off their limited knowledge to prove they know as much as you and having to bite your tongue, I now understand the bored look on the teacher’s face because they too wish they were out in the sunshine.
March 2016
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