Author’s notes:
This is a fictionalised account of a family story. Not all of it is true. No slight or slur is intended on any of the characters herein.
This story takes place in a time before webcams, email, VOIP and internet.
There is no connection between the photograph (which is me, in a tiny bit of snow) and the events in the story, except that it was the trigger for this tale.
Snow
‘I spent the night in a cell.’ This was not the reply Jerry’s friends had expected when they’d asked ‘how did it go at the weekend?’ Jerry, like most of his friends at the working men’s club were creatures of habit, and law abiding, too. All retired, their conversation was usually about what they’d read in the papers that day, what was on television last night and updates on their aches and pains. Rarely was there any gossip or anything exciting to talk about. Even their holidays were repetitive, going back year after year to the places that they knew and were comfortable with. Jerry, the most widely travelled of them all, almost never went away now. He was quite content with his routine of tending the garden, tinkering in the shed he’d built many years before, and having a couple of pints at the club in the evening.
New Year’s Eve was the one time that he did usually do something special. His birthday was January 1st so New Year had always been special and his family had always celebrated. When his niece had got married on New Year’s Eve many years ago, she had not forgotten Uncle Jerry’s birthday and there had been a birthday cake brought out after the wedding cake. But no new year and birthday had ever been as special as the one just over six weeks ago. His daughter and her husband had told him that they had tickets for the new year’s eve do at their local club, bigger and grander than his local, and that they would collect him at seven.
Jerry had been quietly annoyed when, just after seven, Eric turned up alone saying ‘Christine wasn’t quite ready so I’ve come to get you while she finishes painting her face’. If they weren’t at the club early enough they’d never get a table and Jerry was too old to spend the evening standing. Pulling up outside their small terraced house, Eric said ‘She’s probably still not ready, Jerry, you might as well come in and wait.’
‘But we have to go now!’ Jerry did try to hide his annoyance. ‘Perhaps if she knows I’m still in the car she’ll hurry up.’
‘It’ll be better if you come in and tell her’ Eric said.
Jerry really couldn’t understand why he was so relaxed about it. But, knowing that he wasn’t getting anywhere he resolved himself to an evening of sitting way at the back of the club where he couldn’t see the entertainment or possibly having to stand. He followed Eric through the door of the house and into the front room.
‘Surprise!’
‘Happy New Year!’
‘Happy Birthday Uncle Jerry!’
All his nieces and nephews, the two of his brothers who were still alive, and several old friends were gathered in his daughter’s house. Jerry was speechless. His favourite nephew, Connie, captured his expression on the video camera he was holding.
‘There isn’t a do at the club’ Eric said. ‘Or, if there is, we’re not going. It was just a ploy to get you to this party while keeping it secret.’
‘There’s another surprise, too’ Christine told him, handing him a drink. ‘Connie has brought his video camera and, in New Zealand, Terry and Ros also have a video camera. They are waiting by the phone for us to call. They will video it at that end and Connie will video it here. Then we’ll post the tapes to each other.
Jerry was overwhelmed. As the youngest of fifteen most of his siblings were now dead but their children, his nieces and nephews, still kept in touch. Not just duty visits or phone calls but they obviously genuinely liked him and cared about him. He counted himself very lucky to have such a great family. All the cousins got on well, being mates as well as cousins. They’d drink together, holiday together, were godparents to each other’s kids ensuring that the next generation were bonded as family too. Growing up in New Zealand Jerry’s only son, Terry, had missed out on all this. Jerry’s kiwi ex-wife had married the man who had employed her as his ‘housekeeper’ (Jerry always saw the inverted commas when he thought of this, which was rarely now) suspiciously soon after leaving him. He knew that Terry had two step-sisters, the older children of this new husband. Nyree then had two sons by this man so, as well as his English half-sister, Terry also had two half-brothers with whom he’d grown up. But it wasn’t the same, Jerry mused. Not like having all these aunts and uncles and cousins around you, people with your blood and your name. Christmas cards and the occasional photograph was no substitute for the real thing.
But Jerry wasn’t allowed to become maudlin. Everyone wanted to know how he was and if he’d guessed about the party.
‘Of course he hadn’t’ said twelve-year-old Deanne, ‘the surprise on Great-Uncle Jerry’s face was amazing’.
Christine brought a small table and the phone over to him and said ‘We’re going to call Terry, now’ she said, ‘he’s waiting.’
Jerry was nervous. How would he feel? What would he say? Would his accent make him difficult to understand? The only contact with the kiwi accent Jerry had had since leaving New Zealand in the late 1950s was the twice yearly tapes he exchanged with his best friend, Clarrie.
‘Don’t worry about the number, I’ve got it on a pre-set button,’ Christine was telling him. ‘You just hold the receiver and I’ll dial.’
***********
In the tiniest, coldest, room he had ever seen, Terry sat huddled in a new thick jumper and waited for the phone to ring. He could hear the sounds of the party in the next house, as it if were the next room. Actually, it was the next room. He couldn’t believe people really lived this close to each other, and with such thin walls. He’d seen Coronation Street on the television but thought that the houses, like the characters, were fiction. He’d never believed people really lived like that. You could hear everything your neighbours did. There was practically no outdoor space. No wonder the poms were rubbish at sport. No space to play and far to cold to go outside anyway.
When he was planning this trip he had gone shopping for a coat. It had been mid-summer and the shop assistant asked ‘are you expecting it to get cold?’
‘I’m going to England’ he’d told her. ‘I hear it gets cold there. It’s their winter. I’m hoping I’ll see some snow.’
He’d seen snow, of course. On the mountains. He’d never been to the South Island, to Mount Cook which was always photographed with at least a dusting of snow, or to the glaciers at Fox and Franz Joseph. But the North Island mountains Taranaki and Ruapehu both had snow sometimes. He’d never seen snow falling though. He hadn’t expected England to be this cold, and it wasn’t even snowing. Christine said that it was a little colder than normal for the time of year, but nothing special. What a country!
The phone rang at last and Terry picked it up. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello, Terry? This is your dad, in England, how are you, son?’
They chatted for a while, both unsure what to say. Jerry was surprised at how clear the line was. ‘It didn’t sound like he was twelve thousand miles away’ he said, ‘I expected a delay on the line but it was as though he was just around the corner.’
Terry had lied and said ‘yes’ when his dad asked if he and his family were going to spend New Year’s Day on the beach. Sitting alone in this dark, cold country he confirmed that the sun was shining and that it looked like it was ‘going to be a hot one’. Throughout the call he worried that they would run out of things to say. A minute after he put the phone down he heard Christine let herself into the house.
‘Ready?’ she asked.
He swallowed a glass of rum and followed her next door.
*******************
‘Dad, we’ve got another, even bigger, surprise for you.’ Christine approached Jerry’s chair where he had been answering questions from his family: ‘how did he sound?’ ‘how long since you spoke to him?’ ‘how long since you’ve seen him?’
Acting as though she were a presenter on “This Is Your Life” she said ‘you thought you were speaking to Terry in New Zealand but you weren’t. You were phoning next door, where we’d hidden him.’
Jerry tried to make sense of what he was hearing.
‘Not just a surprise party. Not just a surprise phone call. Tonight, Dad, all the way from New Zealand, Terry has come here for your birthday!’
Standing behind her was the tallest man in the room. Taller than the other men present he was, nonetheless, the image of all his cousins. There was no mistaking this tall, tanned bloke was a Jackson.
‘Hello dad’ said the man his toddler son had become.
***************
Six weeks later Jerry and Terry had more than got over their initial shyness, had drunk together, swapped stories and histories. They had seen London together, Jerry seeing old familiar places through new eyes. Not that many of the old familiar places existed anymore. The formerly working class area in which he’d spent the first fifteen years of his life, and the past thirty-odd years living close to, had mostly gone. Replaced by offices full of yuppies and trains that ran themselves with no drivers. Connie – he of the video camera – was a history fan and had taken Terry out in his black cab and shown him all the sights, telling him about this king and that queen. Jerry had shown his son the market where his grandfather and his aunts and uncles used to have stalls. Told him about the sister who sold live eels, the grandfather who could sell anything. They had drunk in pubs that still bore the names of, but no other resemblance to, the pubs in which Jerry had drunk in the past. Mostly they had drunk in the working men’s club where Jerry proudly introduced his son to the regulars.
Apart from falling snow, the two other things that Terry had been hoping to see in the UK were squirrels and thatched cottages. Christine, amazed to learn that there are no squirrels in New Zealand, had taken him to a local park where he had been amazed by them. He’d had no luck with the thatched cottages. ‘I don’t think they really exist much outside of calendars and chocolate boxes’ Jerry had told him. For all that he had travelled the world in his twenty years as a merchant seaman, Jerry’s knowledge of his own country was pretty much limited to London where thatched cottages are not seen.
Just as Terry was beginning to get used to the cold (and the damp, and the dark – it got dark so early!) a big freeze descended on south east England like a paralysing blanket. They had woken one morning to snow that covered the cars, the roads, the roofs. Used to seeing pictures of snow on mountains this alien landscape of urban whiteness confirmed for Terry that he really was in a foreign country. It felt alien. Even the light, coming in thought the small bedroom window (he had moved from Christine’s tiny house to dad’s even tinier one) was strange. He knew that it was the sunlight reflecting off the white snow but it felt so strange. As was the expression “blanket of snow”.
‘Do they keep the blankets in the freezer in this country, then?’ he’d asked his dad when he’d heard this description on the weather reports. It was the coldest, snowiest winter England had seen for thirty-five years.
‘Well, you wanted to see snow falling, so this must be your fault’ dad’s friends had joked. The cousins said much the same thing. ‘I hope it thaws before you go home’ some of them added.
*****************
The date on his return ticket approached and the thaw had not happened. Their had been a round of goodbye parties and drinks. Nothing on the scale of the New Year’s Eve party, but those who lived close enough, who could get through the snow, came to say goodbye. The crowd at the working men’s club had all wished him well and said how sorry they were to see him go. Several asked if there was room in his luggage to take them back to his warm country.
They left early for the trip to Heathrow. Connie had said that he would have offered to take them in his black cab but he would be out of the country, taking the family to Canary Islands for some winter sun that he had booked before he knew of Terry’s visit. Being able to visit so many other countries just a few hours flight away was another strange feature of his father’s country. New Zealand was a million miles from anywhere.
Trying not to think too much about this being ‘goodbye’ Terry and Jerry got a cab to the station and the tube to the airport. The journey was, surprisingly, straightforward with no hold ups or delays. There was still snow on the ground, with ice below the snow, but it seemed to be stabilising. It even felt a little warmer. Or was that the thought of the sun back home?
At the airport Terry’s flight was showing as ‘on time’ and they had hours to kill. They went for a meal and a few drinks. Checking the indicator boards again they saw that the flight was now listed as ‘delayed’ but with no further information. Seeking further information they discovered that all the planes were frozen and that Heathrow only had one de-icer.
‘Your plane is queued for de-icing, sir, but there are others ahead of it. Flights which are due to leave before yours.’ They were told that he would get home, eventually, but they couldn’t say when his flight would leave.
Finding a window, they looked out to see that the weather had changed drastically while they had been eating. The slight warming had been a red herring. A literal ‘calm before the storm’. There was a blizzard out there now. Flurries of snow beat down against the windows and everything was shapeless under new fallen heaps of snow.
Realising that he was not the only one who had a journey ahead of him that night Terry urged his father to set off home now. Jerry was reluctant to go.
‘You’ll never get back’ Terry said. ‘What time do the tubes stop running? If my flight continues to be delayed you will miss the last train.’
Eventually, after a call for passengers on Terry’s flight to go to the boarding gate, Jerry said a final goodbye to his son, knowing that he would probably never see him again, and set off for the underground.
While Jerry sat in a metal tube in an underground tunnel, Terry sat in a metal tube on a runway. His plane had been de-iced but the weather was so bad that starting from the front, by the time the de-icer had reached the back of the plane the front was frozen again. He wondered how his dad was faring.
Under the ground the tube train made reasonable progress. The carriage was fairly empty, people were staying in rather than venturing out in the freak weather. But when the train reached the part of the line that was above ground it stopped. Unexplained delays on a tube are not unusual and Jerry sat looking through the wallet of photographs in his pocket, looking at images of his son with him in London.
The train started again, jerkily, then shuddered to a halt. The loudspeakers crackled and the few people around him looked up from their magazines as they tried to decipher the announcement. It was repeated but was still unintelligible. People shrugged and went back to their reading.
A few minutes later the train slowly moved again and eventually pulled into the next station. A man, realising this was his stop, got up and stood by the carriage door, pressing the buttons to get out. Nothing happened. Frustrated, he tried again. Still nothing. None of the doors were opening.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked. He spoke out loud but expected no answer. People don’t talk to each other on London Transport.
The connecting door from the next carriage opened and a middle-aged man who had supplemented his uniform with a thick knitted scarf entered.
‘Sorry folks, this is the end of the line. We can’t go any further.’
On exiting the tunnel the driver had found that the snow had made it impossible to continue. All over London tube trains were stopping. Those that were still in under the ground were decanting their passengers there. The few that had left their last underground station before getting the message from HQ, and who were unable to reverse back to a station because other trains were there, had to wait while snow was cleared from tunnel exit to nearest platform.
‘Now what are we supposed to do?’
‘How do we get home?’
‘Can we use our tickets on the buses?’
The uniformed man was used to everyone talking at once. He stayed calm. It was only a job and there was a nice warm fire and a kettle in the staff room.
‘Yes, you can use your tickets on the buses. I don’t know how clear the roads are but you can try. No, I don’t know when the trains will start up again, ask a weatherman.’ With that he was gone, moving on to the next carriage as the doors opened and other uniforms could be heard calling ‘All change, please, all change’ as they walked along the platform and woke those confused passengers who had fallen asleep and had hoped they had reached their station.
Outside the station Jerry was surprised to see the welcoming sight of a big red routemaster bus. The lights were on and the conductor, standing on the platform at the back, confirmed that they were going to try to drive along the roads.
‘We’ll do our best, mate. That’s all we can do,’ he said. ‘Jump on. The roads were clear when I started my shift but there’s been a lot of snow since then.’
Jerry moved as far towards the front of the bus as he could, away from the open back of the bus. Younger, fitter passengers had climbed the stairs. The bus inched its way along the normally busy road.
‘Nuffink on the road, see, that’s yer trouble.’ The conductor was in a talkative mood. ‘Normally the roads are kept clear because of all the traffic going along and warming it up. Yer pavements might be covered with snow and ice ‘cos people don’t wanna walk, but yer motorist, see, he’ll still go out. Yer lorries and yer buses, they keep going. Keeps it clear, like, know what I mean?’ He looked around for confirmation that the passengers did, indeed, know what he meant.
He continued ‘But this, blimey, I ain’t never seen nuffin’ like it. All the years I’ve been on the buses, I tell ya, ain’t never seen nuffin’ like it. Nuffink abaht.’
He carried on in this vein and Jerry tuned him out, eventually dropping into a light doze. When he woke everyone was grumbling and getting off.
‘Can’t get no furvah, sorry. Road’s completely impassable.’ the conductor was saying. ‘Ain’t never seen nuffin’ like it.’
Out on the street the world was white. Not the dirty grey slush typical of London snow but white. Jerry, who had nearly lost his ears to frostbite on a ship near Russia many decades ago, was uneasy. No, to tell the truth, he was worried. No way to get home, no where to stay. This was not an area where he would find a hotel or a guest house, even if he’d had been carrying the money to pay for such a thing. What to do?
Shining in the near distance was a blue lamp with a word written in white. He’d throw himself on their mercy. Not the way he’d expected to spend the night but beggars can’t be choosers as he told himself.
Holding tightly to the handrail as he climbed the gritted steps jerry entered the police station.
‘Can you help me?’ he asked the man on the desk. ‘I’ve just seen my son off at Heathrow. The trains and the buses have stopped. I’m five miles from home and, at sixty-seven, I’m too old to walk that far in the snow. Could I sit in here till the morning? I’ll freeze outside.’
‘We can do better than that, sir,’ said the policeman. ‘You can have a cell for the night. Don’t worry,’ he added, seeing the look on Jerry’s face, ‘we won’t lock you in. We’ll even bring you a nice cuppa in the morning. In fact, let me get you one now, you look like you could use a warm.’
‘They gave me all the blankets they had,’ Jerry told his audience, ‘and that’s how I came to spend the night in a cell.’
