A Cold Winter

I don't often think back to my days at Glengorse, a prep school near Battle in Sussex where I spent the years from 1954 to 1958, mainly because I was deeply unhappy there. One of the few things that kept us boys going were the friendships we made with fellow-sufferers. The boy on the left is Roger Soole, to whom I owe a deep debt of gratitude because he was the only boy who, during a half-term break, asked me to come home with him to the farm near Welwyn Garden City where he lived with his parents and older sister. Not having parents in the country, most half-terms I stayed alone at the school, free to wander the fields and woodlands and be treated kindly by the resident staff.

One of my abiding memories of the school was how cold it was in winter. The dormitories weren't heated so frost formed on the inside of the windows on very cold nights. The only 'warm' rooms were the classrooms and common rooms where the boys spent such little free time as we were allowed. By modern standards we weren't really dressed for the cold: in this picture I'm wearing a woollen singlet under a flannel shirt, a long-sleeved wool sweater, and a tweed jacket. I must have felt reasonably warm at the time as my left hand is gloveless!

We kept warm by exercising: on a cold day like this one we'd have been out running around during mid-morning break, and out again in the afternoon for some sort of sporting activity. Usually, if there was a good dump of snow like this one which meant we couldn't play rugby or soccer, the staff organised the boys into two teams, each with a citadel on a small hilltop, upon which we built a fort out of snow which we then defended against the attacking team.

Few homes in those days were fully centrally heated. Even into the 1990s we only heated the rooms in which our family needed to be comfortably warm. Although the central heating could be turned on in the children's bedrooms, for example to allow them to do their homework, I think we may have erred on the chilly side: our children complain that they remember being cold.

Age has changed me. Now I'm cold even on days when other people are walking around in shorts and tee shirts. I tell myself that it's because I was brought up on the East African coast where the temperature rarely drops below 20C, a temperature which, these days, I consider to be an absolute minimum for comfort. As I keep telling people, humans, and me in particular, should never have migrated out of Africa. It's where both I, and we as a species, were born, and it's where we should have stayed.