Snow business

In our little pocket of coastal Northumberland, the snow rarely lingers. It has a tough battle against the salt air and needs to come fully equipped with reinforcements if it is to win the right to settle. It did - briefly - overnight but the roads are again wet and grass is peeping through the temporary dusting on lawns and fields.

It's a different story inland. Drive along an uncovered Beadnell Straight towards Swinhoe and before you reach the top, there will be snow. A definite line marks the end of the salty dominance. Looking out from my garden, the Cheviots have been white for a few days. And it's supposed to be spring.

I have a love-hate relationship with snow. Currently, I'm happy to be smothered in the stuff: I am off work for a week and the Grey Mare has a stable to be tucked into. But when I have to drive through it, and in previous years when she lived outside all year round, I hated it. Then, I was glad of our special little ecosystem.

Sometimes, though, the snow beats the salty air. At school, I prayed for snow, because it meant we would be sent home. The thickest I have ever seen was in February of 1987. We were all but blocked in for about a week. I loved it. The Grey Mare's predecessor (another grey mare, natch) lived at a dairy farm in the next village. I would trudge through the snow to feed her and be brought home by the tractor that had been called into service to deliver the milk.

The grey mare # 1 is long gone, and so is the dairy: houses occupy the field where the ponies grazed adjacent to black and white cows. I still think of them every time I pass by.

Little luxuries

My shower is on strike. Apparently it’s just too big and powerful for the fuse box and it won’t work again until a new one is installed. As I’ve said before, I am a bath person; but I have a lot of hair and I like to rinse the conditioner off with the shower.

Instead, I am pouring beakerfuls of water over my hair to rinse it. It puts me in mind of my teenage years before we had a shower fitted. I must’ve been about 14 or 15. We had central heating installed around the same time: the radiators were an utter luxury. They meant the end of freezing mornings dressing with the airing cupboard door open, socks and knickers warming on the tank. It was also the finish of the feathers and fronds left by Jack Frost’s fingers on the windowpane; of warm, white breath blowing a window within the window to see if it had snowed overnight.

Until last year, I spent almost five years in a house with an open fire and no central heating. I coped fine with two oil filled radiators that plugged into the electricity socket. My current home has storage heaters but I am too mean to switch them on. Instead, I heat the room I’m in and put on an extra jumper. I think my generation was the last to grow up without central heating as the norm.

Where I live, there is no mainline gas. I remember approaching a gas cooker with trepidation when I first left home. Now I would love a gas cooker. I’d like the option of gas central heating too. But what I really, really want is my shower back. It can be grim up North, you know …

A boxful of memories

My very first memory is of standing in a garden surrounded by flowers. The flowers were taller than I was. It was the garden where I learned to walk. I drive passed it most days.

There is another house and garden that lives in my box of memories that I also see daily. I never lived there but I yearned to. I still do; I have fleeting daydreams of what it will be like when it is mine.

Watching the wind ripple through the young corn today took me back to sitting on a wall at the edge of that garden, gazing at gusts eddying and flowing through the green wheat. In the spring, the wind in that garden shook the catkins on the pussy willow trees and made the bluebells dance.

In the heat of childhood summers, we would walk waist deep in the round pond, avoiding goldfish and shuddering as the cold mulch squished between our toes. There were tiny, periwinkle blue flowers on the rockery and pansies with gaudy faces. Beyond that grew gnarled crab apple trees where once I spied a lady with a pink crinoline and parasol that no-one else saw.

The greenhouses were warmed by metal pipes, where fat, brown toads lived among the powerful, earthy scent of tomato plants and geraniums. Inside the house, an Aga constantly supported a bubbling pan, while a smoky grey cat purred on the hearth of a giant stone fireplace.

Hidden behind the curtain and sitting on the window seat, I would look across the fields to the sea in the early summer. The sunlight sparkled and pirouetted on the calm surface like a separate entity. Outside, roses climbed a trellis on the wall.

When it’s mine, I won’t change a thing …

Freedoms

When I was small, I had a black rocking horse. His name was Midnight Melody. Together, we won the Grand National numerous times, and were also pretty hot show jumpers and three day eventers. Our adventures were only constrained by my imagination and his yellow stand. Sometimes, I thought if I rocked fast enough, we would break free even of that, and we’d be off …

When I obtained the flesh and blood version as a teenager, I rode – alone and with friends – for hours on end. I would visit schoolmates in the next village or the next village but one; we would ride on the beach and through other people’s fields, jumping low walls and seats; we would skive off school when the hounds met nearby; occasionally, we would clatter under castle arches to be served sherry on a silver tray by a Lady who wore diamonds in her hair.

Now, the horsy girls go round and round in the arena or spend an hour on the beach. They don’t seem go adventuring. But this is the modern world where even the back lanes are now filled with cars that don’t know the Highway Code says they must slow down for horses. Nor do anxious mothers know who is behind the steering wheel. Byways we used as a matter of course are no longer accessible.

Youth, they say, is wasted on the young. I like to think I didn’t waste mine. I hope today’s kids don’t either; I hope they too have boxfuls of rose-tinted memories to take out on greyer days, and sigh over the freedoms they once had.

Childhood favourites

Hoarding, I think, is a gene you are born with. I definitely have it; I hate to throw anything away, because it may well prove usual in the future. I have discovered this through bitter experience: I only ever want something I have not needed for years when it is gone.

I remember as a small child, going to a fete at a big hall. My granddad was determined to divert me from the toy stall, but I would have my way. I was delighted to discover the twins of some of my cuddly toys: toys I no longer played with, but whom I loved nonetheless. When I realised their true identities, I threw a tantrum, then spent all of my money buying them back.

Like those long ago toys, I consider my books to be my friends. I have vast quantities of them and am very possessive of them – which is why I can’t quite fathom why I gave away my Jill books. Perhaps it was because, about to leave home to go to university, I considered it was time to “put away childish things”.

Jill was my horsy heroine. I received my first Jill book as a hand-me-down from a woman my mum was working for, along with my first pair of hand-me -down jodhpurs. Like the jodhpurs – they were ancient elephant-eared Harry Halls – Jill was already rather quaint. Written by Ruby Ferguson between the late 1940s and early 1960s, Jill’s world had disappeared; it was another country, where they do things differently.

Vaguely politically incorrect, Jill’s world is full of gollys, goshes, and simply super exclamations such as “My Russian rabbits!” It’s a world where girls ride out in shirt and tie even at weekends, where tweed hacking jackets are de rigeur and competing in a bowler hat is the norm (I’ve always wanted a bowler hat). Proper teas with sandwiches and cake are daily occurrences and sausages and chips are the height of luxury.

I love Jill because she had attitude. She may have been a demure 1950s teenager, but she was feisty. In Jill’s world, you ‘loathed’ ‘drips’ and ‘blots’ and sarcasm was an art form. Sophistication was pressed powder and a little bit of lipstick. It’s also a world where the health and safety police would have a seizure.

A lot of Jill’s design for life has stayed with me. You try to play by the rules, you tell the truth, you don’t go ‘pot-hunting’ at gymkhanas, and you always put your horse’s welfare before your own. If you do that, you too can win the under-16 jumping at Chatton Show with your ‘ordinary’ ponies Black Boy and Rapide.

There are nine Jill books in the series and in the last few years, I’ve bought them all back. Dipping into one is not only nostalgia for my own childhood, it’s also a rose-tinted wallow in a world I never knew.