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Let’s get it right once and for all. The Year of the Big Snow was 1982! I know this because my first son was born six weeks prematurely on 13th December 1981. He lay, a tiny 5 lb scrap, in his incubator until New Year’s Eve when staff in Holles Street declared him well enough to take home. I looked out the window at the grey snow laden skies and felt the first pangs of new mother guilt. Delight that he was well enough to take home was mixed with fear at what the weather was about to throw at us. Did I have a premonition of what was to come. But take him home we did in sub zero temperatures, to a small three bedroomed house on the north side of Dublin. “Don’t let him get cold,” the hospital had told us and so we stopped off at a friend’s house to pick up a state-of-the-art plug in oil radiator which was the must-have of the time, placed the baby in his moses basket with his hat on, and gazed skywards in foreboding. My memory tells me that the Big Snow started falling that very night, 31st December 1981. But I will stand to be corrected on this. Perhaps it was 1st day of January 1982. But fall the snow did. It fell all night without stopping. And the country woke next morning to that white light in the bedroom which can only mean one thing........... our world was now white. It fell so deeply that the car in our driveway was covered up to the roof. It fell so deeply that there was no question of going to work. There was no “will I venture out” dilemma like we’ve had in this current wave of snow. There was no hope of going anywhere. The country came to a total and complete standstill. Everything stopped. No buses. No trains. No cars. Nobody went to work. Nobody went to school. Pregnant women had to be airlifted out of their homes. Cars were abandoned up and down the country’s roads and drivers trudged in snow blizzards to nearby villages and towns where sustenance was found for them in pubs, community halls and the homes of the local people. Some were marooned for days. . Hardship there was. Tragedies there were. Burst pipes and their prevention was the talk of the time. But my memory of The Year of the Big Snow is one of delight. I was a new mother and my baby son was safe. That was all that mattered to me. On that first morning when the world turned white, the men on our street came out with their shovels and spades and started digging. Up to this, they had hardly known each other, merely waving a greeting across the garden walls on their way to work each morning. Now though, they came together in a good humoured group of male solidarity and by lunchtime on that first day they were a force to be reckoned with. The first task was to dig trenches from our back doors to our coal sheds at the end of the gardens. We all had to feed our ubiquitious back boilers every day, another must-have of the time, and they had voracious appetities for coal. The men went from garden to garden with their spades. We women fed them. The streets were filled with children who had never seen such snow, thrilled that both parents were out on the street with them. With three feet of snow at their disposal they were ecstatic. It was reported in the newspapers that evening that someone had built an igloo in their front garden on the Howth Road and had slept in it safely overnight. This astounded us all and the children turned to igloo making, cutting blocks of snow with kitchen knives and building in a circle from the ground up. The cry would go up. “No, you’re not sleeping in that tonight. I don’t care that the eskimos did. You’re just not!” Toboggans came out of nowhere. Wild shrieks of delight from the children cut the cold air. Snowmen with scarves and pipes stood at every street corner. As the days passed and there was no sign of a thaw, supplies in the local supermarket began to run out. We had to dig deep into our store cupboards for flour to make bread and scones. Potato cakes became the food of the moment. One neighbour took off to Raheny village with a make shift sled one day and came back pulling behind him a sack full of fresh bread that he had bought in the local supermarket. He stood at the end of our road, doling out the bread to us appreciative neighbours. My memory tells me this happy seige went on for more than a week but it couldn’t have been so, could it? My memory also is of camaraderie, community spirit, friendliness, fun, children berserk with excitement, home made bread and scones being passed over fences. A delighted and delightful world. A world that showed that the best of us is there hidden under the surface of our buzy lives. And in the intervening 28 years, what has changed? Nothing much it seems. I saw that same neighbourly human kindness every day on our television screens in November after the floods devastated our country. And it is there alive and well in these days of arctic conditions when our country again ground to a halt. Small acts of thoughtfulness are evident everywhere. I see it every day now as I make my way around my area from home to work and back again. “Here, take my hand, and I’ll help you cross the road.” Our natural inclination to be kind to each other is always there. It just gets lost sometimes. And what about my son, now 28? He still gets giddy with excitement at the sight of snow.
Maeve Edwards |