Excitement and Eskimo ambitions

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jan 19, 2008 

It starts falling somewhere in the middle of French, 16 or 17 minutes before the bell goes for lunch. Slowly at first - forlorn flakes squeezed from a heavy sky - but quickly getting heavier. We all glance up from the pluperfect tense to see a startlingly perfect blind-white swirling sky.

"Settle down, girls, s'il vous plait," says Madame Appleby and when no one even looks at her, she pulls down one of the flimsy blinds. It makes no difference. The blinds are there to cut out the glare of the sun but everyone knows you can't hide snow. The light in the classroom has changed completely - a silent hushed light, full of promise. As soon as the bell goes, we all grab our coats.

Everyone says it won't settle - thin flakes dissolving the moment they touch the hard grey of the playground - and the air's wet, white and disappointing as we drift back in after lunch. Small puddles on the lino floor of the cloakroom, the gloves that people leave on the big old radiator wet-fingered from the game of trying to catch snow. So that's it. It's all over then. The teachers, clothes leaking cigarette smoke after their lunch break, look like they've won.

But towards the end of history, Jackie nudges me. The entire roof of E block has turned white. The tennis courts have disappeared. An ecstatic murmur snakes its way through the class. It's settling, it's settling! "Come on, now," frowns Mr Evans, who is halfway through writing three important points on the blackboard, "I don't know what the fuss is all about. You've all seen snow before."

And we have, it's true, we've all seen it. Never often enough or for long enough or deep enough but still we can't deny that we've seen it. So why is it that every time just feels like the first time all over again? So exciting, so unlikely. What is it about so much frozen water tipping out of a cold bleached sky that can change an entire afternoon - can transform it so completely that, even 30 or more years later, French and history long forgotten, that one afternoon lies stranded in your memory, wild and magical?

But Mr Evans doesn't think about these things. He goes on writing, squeak squeak, on the board. It's not his fault. Mr Evans is the kind of person who dresses all in brown and probably carries on thinking about the Anglo-Saxons even when he's watching television or cleaning his teeth. Mr Evans is either very old now or, more likely, dead, so he almost certainly doesn't remember the moment when Mrs Lakin, acting head of maths, pops her head around the door and tells him that in view of the bad weather the office has decided it's best we all set off quickly and quietly for home. Home! A cheer goes up.

Quickly? Yes. But quietly? No one goes quietly.

People have different arrangements. Some get the school bus, some walk. We have to wait half an hour until our mum can pick us up. Half an hour just inside the playground gates. Half an hour of shouting and screaming and chasing, drinking in the taste and smell of snow. The drive back to where we live nine long miles away in the country is achingly slow and by the time we get home it's properly dark. But you don't need much light to see that here out of town the snow is way better even than at school - properly deep, with seriously hefty drifts up against the back porch, the garden table, the back wall.

I don't know how long it takes me to build it. An hour? Two hours? My sisters don't want to play in the dark, so I do it alone. And it's hard out there with only the gleam of the snow itself to guide me but I have to get on with it right now because you never know with snow. It could all be gone by the morning.

I do it the only way I can think of - one huge snowball after another, lined up next to each other, with another on top and another and another, and more snow packed in the cracks in between, till I have three hard white walls.

The roof's more difficult - how do Eskimos do it? But in the garage I find an old bit of wood that fits perfectly on top and I cover that over with snow. Is it cheating? I don't care. I fetch a torch from the house, and a big plastic bag to sit on, and an apple. And I crawl inside.

It's amazing, so warm in there - and snug, really snug, every trace of wind gone, quiet and still. I sit on the bag and eat the apple and when I've finished doing that I just sit.

If you don't count the dens I've been making with chairs and tablecloths for as long as I can remember, this is the first real house I've built. And back then, aged 12, with snow in my hair and the taste of apple in my mouth, I proudly and nonchalantly imagine it's just the first of a long line of igloos that I'll have in my life.

So it's funny and maybe also a little bit sad to look back now, all these winters later, and realise I was wrong, that was it. It was a one-off - and maybe all the more perfect for that. The one and only igloo of my life.