While our winters have become milder and less predictable, a freezing spell can make life harder in rural places, throwing the focus back upon the importance of community cohesion and neighbourly interaction.
Though it is enlivening and exhilarating, working outdoors in the sort of ‘proper winter’ many of us love, is hard. For me, it’s the stubbornly frozen gate padlocks or barn-door bolts, far from a source of hot water, that can bring me close to tears.
It can be so cold it hurts. You can work up a sweat, pulling layers off and putting them back on, then shivering uncontrollably when the moisture cools on your body and the sun dips away.
And there are any number of jobs that can’t be done with gloves on: using a spanner to tighten a bolt, doing up buckles on a bridle or saddle – and twice a day, if there are animals, you’re going to have to get your hands in the trough to lift out panes of ice, as whole as you possibly can. It is key, then, to remember not to put your wet hands on the metal gate, for fear of them sticking.
It’s vital to have good relations with your neighbours (as well as good for the soul), to be able to knock and ask for a flask or pan of warm water to tip over frozen metal or, when the outside taps freeze (despite being thatched in straw and baler-twined with an old feed sack), buckets-full from the kitchen tap.
Never mind snow – neighbours or roads can become iced-in. The WhatsApp groups that have remained since Covid lockdowns kick in again.
Last winter, our small wood axe was employed to chip at the thickening ice in the field buckets over days, creating a succession of cold, fallen moons laid out beside them in sequence: quarter moon, half moon, full, and waning; each having captured air bubbles like clouds across their surface.
Bucketing water down to the horses is treacherous on the icy lanes, and a slip and spillage can result in water sloshed down the inside of your wellies and a patch of new black ice on the road. It is warmth personified when the shepherd you wave to in the pick-up every day returns your daily cheerfulness, driving your buckets down to the field gate.
Getting out can be a problem, too. Never mind snow – neighbours or roads can become iced-in. The WhatsApp groups that have remained since Covid lockdowns kick in again, to help those who daren’t risk a slip; shopping lists, prescriptions and dog walks are shared out.
Without pavements, on narrow and unlit roads, every car on ice is a danger to pedestrians; particularly when the ice-free part of the Tarmac is often the drier, slightly grassy camber in the middle.
Earlier this year, roads running with rainwater still coming off the downs froze in thick, rippled glaciers.
I took to walking on the frozen tractor-tyre ruts beside the hedge for purchase. The bus became stuck, until a farmer fetched a tractor scoop of yard grit and chaff. It was enough for the bus to grip and continue into town, with a cheer from its passengers.
We put out food and water for wildlife, but think about the rest of our community, too – offering hot showers to one whose heating oil has run out (in these places beyond the gas pipelines) or firewood to another. So many houses are poorly insulated and damp, and without the warmth of surrounding buildings.
But as the yard tap begins to thaw and drip, and the hoar frost needles tinkle to the sugar-frosted ground, we are already nostalgic for the joyous respite from the mud. The mistle thrush continues to sing, as he has since the 21st of last month, when the year turned to the light: a song full of the bleak tang of a cold metal gate, suffused with determined, celandine, neighbourly warmth.
