WHY is that it only takes a light dusting of snow for so many schools to close these days?
The winter of 1946-47 was the harshest winter in the UK for more than 300 years.
Every day for six weeks from January 22, snow fell somewhere in the country.
Six years old at the time, me and my five-year-old brother were living with an aunt at Greatstone-on-Sea on the Kent Coast, while my father, recently released after several years as a prisoner-of-war, re-established his medical practice in South East London.
Every day for three weeks we trudged almost two miles across the marshes - for much of the way through waist-deep snow - to our school in New Romney.
The war having only just ended, there was no heating in the classrooms, so we sat at our desks all day wearing our Wellington boots, macintoshes (full-length, semi-waterproof raincoats - no such things as padded and fleeced parkas in those days), woollen balaclavas and woollen gloves - doing our best to hold pieces of chalk in our ice-cold fingers and write on the cardboard ‘slates’ that had replaced exercise books as a result of the dire paper shortage.
Lunch was invariably vegetable soup and bread.
At the end of the school day we made the same journey home in the dark arriving soaked to the skin having fallen into a frozen dyke.
But, believe it or not, we did not feel hard done by - in fact we looked upon the experience as something of an adventure.
I can’t help but wonder how today’s generation of schoolchildren and, more to the point, teachers, would have coped under those circumstances.
It seems to me that we are raising a generation of wimps.
ROBERT READMAN
Norwich Avenue West, Bournemouth
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