Posted by Peter Ceresole on November 13, 2008 at 14:16:10 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Tie points - posted by John Lambert on November 13, 2008 at 07:12:17:
I remember that winter well.
I think just about everybody who lived through it remembers the winter of '47. Not just cold- it went on forever, and the post-war coal shortages and power cuts made it much worse.
The actual house and trap door are still there in high rez on Google Maps, by the way. 51°29'58.88"N 0°12'31.91"W. You can see the gutter in question very clearly, running along the southern edge of the roof. The raised edge casts a clear shadow. Just behind it, in the roof, is the trap door in which I crouched.
60 years ago. Oh wow... No cars in the street then, of course.
The waterpipe on the house next to ours broke and for days there was a fantastic icicle about three feet diameter from the breach down to the ground.
Now there you're edging into Beckfoot Plumbing territory. I'm not sure how anybody not brought up in England can imagine how generally lousy and inadequate British plumbing, and house insulation, was then. To protect interiors from plumbing problems (I'm pretty sure that had to be the reason) a great deal of the pipework was placed outside, especially the outflow from sinks and baths. They used to freeze quite regularly and make a mess; I remember in the '60s, still, when there was a hard freeze, leaning out of a window high up a wall, and pouring kettles of boiling water down onto the pipes below so we could empty a bath. Eventually it worked...
Then global warming (and new fangled central heating) rescued us.
But in Ransome's time it must have been pretty grim. However, expectations were lower, and children were tougher. In fact, here in London, I'm perpetually astonished by the young women going out in winter wearing effectively almost nothing. It looks incredibly uncomfortable and I've never seen anything like it in Switzerland or Germany. But WH tells us that appalling toughness was taken for granted. And I suppose that those young women have their own priorities. But still... only in Britain.