This week, frosts have arrived with biting, sharp mornings in Shepparton.
So, here’s a winter episode from Tales From Wales.
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Winter in Wales was only fun if it snowed.
If it didn’t snow, the weeks were wet and dreary, and I didn’t see my friends Geraint and Cellan for days and days.
There was nothing to do but write in my diary, look at the sky and avoid Mum’s wooden spoon in the kitchen.
Walt said it only snowed if it warmed up a bit.
I didn’t really understand why, but I believed him because he was a scientist, and he was my dad.
For a few days, dawn was just dark grey, but then it turned to light grey.
Then, sure enough, one morning, the light was white, and it came from the ground, not the sky.
I pulled the curtains back, and I saw a new world where everything was covered in a giant, white, sparkling bed cover. It looked like ice-cream had been poured all over the world.
The garden steps had disappeared, and so had the rhubarb patch, the blackberry bushes and the spades and buckets. Even the mound of Old Pete’s grave had vanished under the white blanket. Walt’s beanpoles were the only familiar things still visible. They stuck out of the ice-cream carpet like radio aerials, and they dripped with giant icicles.
This was not a landscape anymore — it was a funscape.
So, I went off up the hill, which we called The Cwm, with Geraint and Cellan to knock snow off tree branches.
If you did it just right, you could dump a big load of freezing snow on the person walking right in front of you on the path.
The trick was to find a long stick heavy enough to bash snow off an overhead branch. But there were no sticks on the ground because everything was under the white blanket, so we brought our own snow sticks. Geraint had a cricket bat, Cellan used a long handle brush and mine was a long beanpole nicked from Walt’s garden shed.
We raced each other up the invisible forest path to be the first to find a branch and bring down a snow bomb on someone’s head.
It wasn’t really a race; it was more of a plod because the snow was up to our knees, and we had to move like deep-sea divers wearing lead boots underwater. Geraint was a year older and stronger than us, so he always got in the first whack with his cricket bat. Cellan was smaller but quicker. He dodged the falling white powder bombs and grabbed a handful on the way down to make a snowball and throw it at us. He always got Geraint with a good whack on the back of the head, which made him really mad.
After whacking tree branches, we walked as far as we could up The Cwm to find the pond at the top, which we knew would be frozen solid. Everything looked completely different — the paths and rocks had disappeared, the trees looked shorter and the birds were silent. Walking on soft snow was exciting and scary because you never knew what was underneath. It could be just stones and leaves, or it could be a huge hole where your leg disappeared and you fell over sideways. We were careful to avoid the edge of the old quarry — one wrong step and we could disappear into a white hole for ever.
When we got to the pond, it was dark and smooth, like thick glass. If you looked down at your feet, you could see plants and leaves trapped, like in an old painting.
Cellan found a water beetle frozen under the ice. You could see its shiny black shell and legs poking out. You could even see a dark line down its back where it had tried to open its wings before being caught in the ice. It looked like it was swimming, but it wasn’t. I wondered if it would fly away when the ice melted. We all got down on our knees and had a good look.
The pond surface was cold and hard — perfect for skating.
We didn’t have skates, but we slid around in our gumboots and fell over a lot. Geraint said he was going to see how strong the ice was, so he found a big rock poking out of the snow and started kicking it towards the frozen pond. We all took a turn, kicking the rock through the snow towards the pond. Then Geraint kicked it right into the middle and jumped on it, and the ice split with a loud ‘crack!’
We ran as fast as we could to get on solid ground. But Geraint wanted to be a rugby player, and he ate banana sandwiches and two tins of corned beef a week, so he wasn’t fast enough, and he fell through the ice and got freezing cold water in his boots, which made him really mad again.
After a few days, the snow turned from soft white powder to grey mush mixed with icy hard bits, and everything slowly returned to normal.
The garden steps came back, and so did the blackberry bushes, the buckets and spades and old Pete’s grave. I really hoped the water beetle managed to wake up and fly away.
The world became grey and dull again, and I spent long days staring out of the window at the rain. But for a while, it was a magic place where you could walk through frozen ice-cream and look through water turned to glass.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
