IN the BLEAK MID-WINTER

You can get 50/1 at William Hill on no "white Christmases" before 2050. It sounds like a sure thing to me. Irving Berlin's couplet "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones we used to know" was written at a time when seasonal snow was still common: it was a kind of cosy, fake nostalgia for a time that had not even yet passed. The Independent [White Christmas bets 'on way out', December 26th 2006] quotes the bookie to the effect that global warming may well cause such weather to be "consigned to the history books", however. White Christmases will indeed be something we used to know.

If you were born after the 1950s, there's a lot you won't know about cold winters. My generation was brought up before the arrival of central heating. Public buildings, institutions and very grand houses had big chunky cast-iron radiators that circulated hot water around appropriate areas but these were too unwieldy for ordinary houses. Double glazing, loft insulation and efficient draught excluders were in the future. On cold winter mornings, we were deeply reluctant to get out of bed because the bedroom would be freezing. On the windows, frost would have left intricate patterns. Unless you lived through that time, you cannot imagine the dazzling effect of this curious phenomenon, so magical that it had to be anthropomorphized: the author of this handiwork was named Jack Frost. The greatly increased warmth of modern houses killed off Jack Frost for ever.

In those days, bedrooms often had grates. If your room was above the living room, you might have a coal fire that shared the chimney with the fireplace below. Many bedrooms were fitted with gas or electric fires, but one was never allowed to keep a fire in after bedtime because of the danger that a counterpane slipping from a bed in the night might catch alight. Flame-resistant fabric was in its infancy then. So any heat that was permitted at bedtime was long since dispersed when you got up.

In my early childhood, in the late 1940s, there were still many houses without electricity. We used sometimes to visit an old friend of my grandfather's, JS Bruce, born like him in the 1870s, who lived with his unmarried daughter Alice and whose house in Kettering was illuminated by gas light. My grandfather, mother and I would sit in the drawing room with him and his daughter taking tea, I perched on a low stool in the corner, forbidden to speak unless spoken to. There would be extended pauses in the conversation, during which the longcase clock ticked remorselessly. The room would grow dim as the afternoon dwindled until Mr Bruce would direct Alice to light the gas and draw the curtains. There was also an immense heavy curtain across the door to divert the draught that whistled down the stairs from the Arctic of the upper floor. To say that the impression that remains with me of those visits is one of oppression would hardly do justice to the case. The life lived in that house would barely have changed since before the first War.

Most houses in those days drew their warmth from a coal fire in the living room, from the oven in the kitchen, perhaps from some kind of stove in the kitchen or the parlour and from an airing cupboard where what was known as "the copper" resided, providing the hot water and allowing space for bed linen and towels to be aired. Coal fires threw out rather less heat than log fires but you could still use them to toast muffins and crumpets and, if you had dogs or cats, you could be sure they would express their preference by lying on the hearth. (Some people's dogs still lived in outdoor kennels at that time). The coal would be banked down with coke or anthracite over night, "kept in" until such time as the ashes had to be cleared out and a new fire built.

If your mother took pity on your complaints that the bed was freezing, you could take a hot-water bottle to bed. I'm sure many people still do that, even in this age of electric blankets, but "a bottle" seems a most archaic object to me. I can just remember us having a stone bottle that could be filled with boiling water and used to heat up a bed but all the later ones were of rubber. There was a certain amount of lore surrounding hot-water bottles. You had to let the water go off the boil so it didn't scald the rubber. You never filled it to the lip but you needed to squeeze out the excess air. These were probably urban myths.

The milkman delivered his wares door-to-door back then, frequently so early that, by the time your mother brought in the milk bottles, their contents were frozen solid. If blue tits lived near your house, they would take advantage of this free milk, peck holes in the foil caps on the bottles and sample the delights below. The cream of a pint of full-cream milk would rise to the top and so-called "top of milk" was always the most desirable part, unless the tits had already got to it.

Fortified by a hearty cooked breakfast, you were packed off to school or to play in the snow. A proper winter is such a vivid season. Few sights are as arresting as a group or a line of trees, every tiny twig of which is picked out in snow. I am not at all surprised that the classic winter landscape is becoming more rare. Maybe the immense amount of heat pumped out by our homes – unimaginable fifty years ago – is making its own critical contribution to global warming.


This piece is not in my book, Common Sense, which you can read for free by downloading it from the link in the right sidebar.