INTRODUCTION & DISCLAIMER – In Essex, England next-door-neighbours Janet and Derek grew up together and have always been really good friends, until both turned 18 and Derek’s feelings for Janet turn to romantic as he develops a crush on his pretty friend. Unwilling to risk their friendship and not sure whether Janet would feel the same way about him, Derek’s feelings for Janet seem set to remain unrequited until the frigid winter of 1962-1963, where one windy, freezing cold and snowy night things take an unexpected turn ….
An entry in this year’s Valentines Day contest, travel back 60 years into the past and have fun with Derek and Janet as they endure the longest and coldest British winter on record, The Big Freeze. Although this weather event was real, the characters and events in the story are fictional, and any similarity to real persons living or dead coincidental and unintentional. Only characters aged 18 and older are in any sexual situations. Please enjoy, and be sure to rate and comment.
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“So Ginger, I think it’s your turn to go out to the shed and get some more coal,” I said to the large marmalade cat, who had laid his long body out on the floor right in front of the coal-fired stove in the sitting room to gain maximum warmth.
The cat looked up at me with his green eyes, but did not move, his expression clearly reading, ‘Get lost Derek, you are the human and I am the cat of the house, it is your responsibility to make sure that I am warm and comfortable at all times.’
“Shall we take a vote on it, Ginger?” I asked. The cat wagged his tail at his annoyance at my disturbing him, and went back to sleep. “Glad it’s settled then, its Derek’s turn to go outside and get more coal.”
The fire definitely needed more fuel, but getting up from the settee in front of the television to go outside and retrieve more was going to take some motivation on my part. A gust of freezing wind blew snow and sleet against the windows, and the lights flickered momentarily. I hoped very much it would not be another blackout, and this time my luck was in and the power stayed on.
Outside, the cold winds picked up again, sounding like the wailing of banshees on this freezing Friday evening. The foul weather caused the picture on the TV to go fuzzy momentarily and then the black and white picture righted itself. Ironically the TV show I was watching — about teenagers enjoying summer at the beach in California — made me feel colder still.
I wished I could jump through the TV and join them on their warm beach where they walked around in swimwear. Even with the fire and my layers of clothes — I wore a coat over a knitted jumper, a long-sleeved shirt and trousers on top of thermal underwear, regular underwear of a vest and boxer shorts underneath all this with a scarf around my neck and thick woolen socks and sturdy shoes on my feet – I was still bloody cold.
Getting up out of my position on the settee, I again addressed the sleeping cat. “Next time Puss, it really is your turn,” I promised him before grabbing my overcoat and a woolen hat to brave the frigid weather conditions on my way to the coal shed.
Going through the kitchen to the back door, I was immediately hit by a blast of frigid night air, like I had walked out of a research base near the South Pole and into the Antarctic evening. But I wasn’t in Antarctica, in fact I was on the other side of the world in Essex, England, not too far out of London.
English weather could be cold and damp at times, but in the southern counties we normally enjoyed far better weather conditions than those in the north of the country and into Scotland, where they were used to much colder winters. But this winter, nobody in Great Britain or Ireland were free of the bitter winds, freezing sleet and huge downfalls of snow that filled gardens and streets like no other winter.
From those in John O Groats in the far north of Scotland to Lands’ End in Cornwall, from Ireland and Wales to the south east of England, we were all in the same positon, chilled to the bone and living in cold and dangerous weather we simply were not used to. The prolonged cold snap was creating chaos up and down the country with icy roads, problems for the trains as snow needed to be cleared and blackouts as the electrical substations struggled to cope and power-poles and electrical wires failed in the adverse conditions.
Shivering as the icy night air seemed to go right through the layers of clothes I wore, I made my way to the coal shed. The howling winds picked up, blowing sleet and snow into my face and I shivered. Opening the coal shed, I filled up a metal bucket with coal and looked up at the dark snowy skies, wondering whether the freezing weather would ever clear. Perhaps we were entering another ice age, and wooly mammoths and sabre toothed tigers would be roaming the streets of London within weeks?
An unusually cold December for Southern England was a taste of things demetevler escort to come. The overnight frosts were quite severe and a heavy pea-soup fog that enveloped London and the surrounding areas for some days — the yellow-tinged smog taking my memories back 10 years to the Great London Smog of 1952 – had led to a rare white Christmas for Essex in 1962 with light snowfall which got even heavier on Boxing Day. It was such a novelty to have snow for Christmas in this part of England, but a month later and with January 1963 nearly at an end, the appeal of snow was well and truly gone.
I turned to go back inside and the wind picked up in intensity, blasting snow at me. “I bet the bloody cat is nice and warm by the fireside,” I grumbled under my breath which was prominent in the icy air, when a loud from next door’s garden made me jump. It was a cracking noise, followed by the sound of glass breaking.
Alarmed, I dropped the coal bucket and ran to the fence as I heard the back door of the house next door slam open and a young female voice exclaim in her Essex accent, “What the hell!?”
Looking around, I grabbed a wooden crate and put it next to the fence, standing on it to look into the neighbors’ back garden. It was pretty obvious what had happened. The strong winds had detached a branch from the tree and sent it through a window, smashing the panes.
Surveying the damage was my neighbor Janet Hutchings. Aged 18 like me, we had grown up together one family each side of the semi-detached house we called home. Janet had been born on a day that was impossible to forget — 6th June 1944 — D Day.
In the Hutchings house back then in the later days of the war the father Fred, mother Martha and two-year-old brother Billy were kept awake at nights by a screaming baby girl. In the Wilson side of the house, the crying baby next door also kept awake the father Tom, the mother Alice and their two-year-old daughter Susan. However, at this stage Alice was heavily pregnant and 10 days after Mr. and Mrs. Hutchings welcomed their infant daughter Janet, Alice Wilson gave birth to a baby boy — me. Now there two screaming infants next to each other keeping both families awake late at night.
So close in age, Janet and I had grown up the best of friends and were always playing together along with our friends, siblings and cousins, walking to school together, helping out with chores and doing homework together. We were still great friends now as young adults, Janet working as an office clerk for a large company in town and me an apprentice mechanic.
At the sound of my voice, Janet jumped and turned around. “Derek, what the hell?!” she exclaimed.
“Sorry Janet, did I scare you?” I asked.
“Quite a bit, first a branch smashes our back window and then you appear out of nowhere,” she said, patting her chest and breathing heavily, her breath like mine clear in the freezing night air.
“Again, sorry about that,” I said, surveying the damage to the Hutchings house with dismay.
“That’s okay Derek, it was just a bit of a shock, sorry I snapped at you I think this cold is making me cranky,” Janet replied.
“That’s okay Janet, I know how you feel and that branch going through the window must have been a shock,” I said.
Janet smiled a reassuring smile, and when Janet smiled her face somehow became even prettier. Of all the baby girls born in Great Britain in the year 1944, young Janet Hutchings would have been at the front of the queue. She was always such a pretty girl with her long dark brown hair, big brown eyes and doll-like features, and now at age 18 was possibly the best looking girl in the entire county of Essex. Last year, Neil Sedaka had released a hit song about a young man who was very happy with his angelic next door neighbor, a huge hit both in his native America and across the Atlantic for us in England. I could well relate to the young man in the song.
Janet’s beautiful looks were matched by her fine slim figure, but obviously she was well-covered tonight in layers of clothing. On her bottom half Janet wore blue jeans and boots, and her top half was covered by a bright red hooded parka. This made her look like a researcher in the Polar Regions, or Little Red Riding Hood. Her Dad good-naturedly teased her about this, while her older brother Billy made similar jokes such as telling Janet to watch out for wolves when he was on leave from the Navy and came home to visit at Christmas.
“I’ll come over and give you a hand,” I said, climbing over the fence and joining Janet in her parents’ back garden, both of us shivering in the winds and viewing the damage the branch had done to the back windows with dismay.
“That bloody wind, it’s like living in Siberia,” Janet lamented, snow and sleet blowing into our faces.
“Is your Dad still working nights?” I asked, as Janet and I surveyed the branch to work out the best way to extricate it from dikmen escort the windows without causing more damage to the other panes.
Janet nodded. “Yeah, he’s at work. Said he and the brigade haven’t been this busy since the days of The Blitz, with it being so cold and people not taking care with their fires, heating and overloading electrical appliances in their homes. More people going to bed early while smoking. Plus blackouts and candles are always a dangerous combination.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I can believe that. Today at work I saw some fire engines speeding to another fire.”
Getting hold of the branch, Janet and I gently pulled it out of the shattered windows, some broken glass falling in the process. The unrelenting wind pushed more cold air into the Hutching family house.
“I see your Dad’s working nights too,” Janet commented. “I passed him on my way home from work, we said hello. Is he busy too?”
“Half and half,” I said. “More problems on the road — you know car accidents and the like because people aren’t used to driving in the snow — but less crime. I think it’s too cold for the crooks to go out stealing stuff or robbing people.”
One coincidence between our families was a father who worked in emergency services. Dad was a Sergeant in the police force, while Janet’s Dad was a Watch Manager for the Essex fire brigade. As kids we always felt really safe, a policeman in one side of the house and a fireman in the other side.
“How’s your Mum and your Nan?” I asked Janet. “I hope she’s okay?”
“Yeah, Mum called earlier,” said Janet. “Nan’s feeling a bit better, getting over that bronchitis, getting back to her old self. Mum and Grandad aren’t so worried now, although Mum said that Suffolk is snowed in too, just like us. Which reminds me, how is your Mum going with Susan up in London? I hope Susan’s feeling better.”
I smiled. “They’re both good, Mum spoke to Dad earlier. Susan’s getting plenty of bed rest for the next month like her doctor ordered, and Mum’s staying for the week to make sure she sticks to the rules and doesn’t overdo things before the babies are born.”
Janet laughed as we carefully picked up some of the larger shards of broken glass, both glad for the protection our gloves provided. “Well, if I was pregnant and put on bed rest, I couldn’t think of a better time for it to happen than now in this crappy weather.” She indicated the snowflakes falling in greater numbers, the windy night seeming to get colder by the second.
“Susan’s not too pleased about the whole complete rest thing, you know my sister, and how she always likes to keep busy.” I laughed, thinking about another similarity between our families, the two mothers away for the week tending to sick relatives. “I think Mum and Keith will have their hands full keeping her under control.”
“With two babies in the house, I think Susan will want nothing more than to lie in bed when the twins arrive but won’t be able to,” Janet observed. “So in a month’s time, you’ll be Uncle Derek and your parents will be grandparents. It’s hard to believe.”
“Yeah, it makes me feel real old,” I said. “I can’t imagine myself being an uncle. Uncle Derek. It makes me sound like I’m 40-years-old.”
“Well in a month’s time you will be an uncle,” said Janet. “You know my friend Pam from the office? She became an aunty when she was two.”
I hadn’t known that about Janet’s friend. “Two? How did she manage that?”
“Pam’s the second youngest of 12 kids, her oldest sister got married and had a kid young, so yeah, Pam became an aunt before she even started school.”
“I couldn’t imagine that,” I said. “So how about you, are you any closer to becoming an aunt? I barely got a chance to catch up with your brother at Christmas, just hello and goodbye? Has Billy found a nice girl in the Navy?”
Janet laughed. “You know that brother of mine with girls. If he was in West Germany and he saw a pretty German girl across the border in East Germany, he’d risk crossing it to chase after her. Knowing Billy, he’d even try and climb the Berlin Wall if he was told there were nice looking girls on the other side. Now Billy’s in the Navy, all handsome in his uniform, he’s probably got a girl in every port.”
I knew Billy Hutchings pretty well, and his younger sister’s assessment of him was pretty accurate. While our families were so similar in many ways, Janet’s older brother and my older sister were not at all similar. Susan and her husband Keith had met and married at a young age and were expecting twins next month. It was hard to imagine ladies’ man Billy settling down in the suburbs with a wife, a couple of kids, a dog and a cat, but even if he did I think he would be off chasing any women who took his fancy, regardless of their marital status. Knowing Billy, if a pretty midwife turned up at the house to deliver their baby, Billy would probably put the hard word on her after she elvankent escort finished upstairs with his wife after giving birth.
Of course, Janet was allowed to say this about her brother and it wasn’t polite for me to say such things so I smiled politely while Janet laughed her cute laugh. “Knowing Billy, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m already an aunty, and Mum and Dad grandparents, only we just don’t know it yet.”
The howling winds showered us with more snow, and we turned our attention to the broken windows with the warm air inside the Hutchings house now escaping and the dwelling no doubt becoming as frigid as the outdoors.
“We’ll have to fix this as best we can, and call out the insurance company and glazier in the morning,” I said, Janet nodding in agreement. There was no way we were getting any professionals out tonight in the near blizzard-like conditions.
“So, does your Dad have any plywood handy?” I asked. “I’ll try and nail them over the broken windows.”
“Thanks Derek, I’ll give you a hand,” said Janet, leading me into the shed, where Mr. Hutchings had a good supply of wood, which included several panels of plywood. Taking a hammer and nails, Janet held the plywood in place while I nailed it into place as best I could over the broken windows. One sheet did not quite reach the broken glass, so Janet and I had to substitute as best we could with some cardboard.
We then tackled the broken glass inside the house and the wet from the melting snow and sleet that had found its way inside with a broom, dustpan and brush and mop. Janet and I were finishing, me casting a discrete glace at Janet’s bum, her rear looking so good in her blue jeans and me feeling guilty at looking at my friend like that, when we heard an indignant cat calling to us and turned around.
Another thing in common between my family and Janet’s was that we kept a pet cat, and the Hutchings family’s pet cat was a black and white tuxedo cat, long and slim. The cat continued to protest to Janet, no doubt noticing that that temperature in the house had now turned freezing cold.
“Okay Felix, I know it’s freezing in here now, I’ll get it warmed up soon,” Janet said to the cat, who like our cat Ginger expected instant attention to any request. Janet shivered, able to feel the icy temperatures through her layers of clothes and red parka. “God only knows how,” she muttered.
“Actually Janet, why don’t you and Felix come and spend the night next door?” I suggested. “It’s absolutely freezing in here, there will be draughts until the windows are fixed and our house is much warmer.”
“Oh thanks Derek, but I don’t want to impose,” Janet said.
“You wouldn’t be imposing,” I assured Janet. “Felix and Ginger get on well together, you can sleep in Susan’s old bedroom or on the settee — it’s probably warmer there to be honest — and tomorrow morning when our Dads get home from work we’ll get the windows fixed.”
“As long as you’re sure,” said Janet.
“Of course I’m sure,” I said. “I’m sure your Dad wouldn’t want to come home from work and find he’s got a frozen cat and a frozen daughter.”
“Thanks Derek, you’re too kind, I’ll just grab a few things,” said Janet. She dashed upstairs, and returned with a small overnight bag a few moments later. Janet extinguished the fire — being the daughter of a fireman she was very safety conscious when it came to fires and didn’t want to take any risks — and I collected Felix for his overnight sleepover with Ginger.
Janet locked up her house, and I carried a protesting pussy cat next door, the cat glaring at me with his feline eyes at me taking him out of a house and into a cold snowy night and clearly thinking I was one of England’s greatest living fools.
“It’s okay Felix, Derek’s not taking you out into the blizzard,” Janet laughed as the cat struggled in my arms, and Janet and I struggled through piles of snow that had accumulated in the front gardens of our houses and all along the street, snow drifts visible on the road itself, and concentrated on keeping our feet and not slipping on the wet, icy pavement.
Back inside my family’s house, I set Felix down and the cat immediately made a beeline for the warmest place in the house — the coal-burning stove. Ginger looked up and the cats greeted each other, before jostling for position in the warmest place to gain maximum heat.
“That reminds me, I was getting more coal when that branch broke your windows,” I said, dashing outside and carrying the coal bucket inside and stoking the fire. “So, I’ll just get you some blankets upstairs.”
I made for the staircase, and Janet accompanied me. “Derek, could I please use your toilet? I was actually about to go to the loo at home when the windows got broken.”
“Of course, I’d hardly say no, would I?” I laughed.
Janet also laughed as we walked upstairs. “No, I guess not.”
On the landing, I went towards the linen cupboard to get more blankets for my unexpected house guest while Janet went into the bathroom, turned on the light and closed and locked the door behind herself. I heard Janet put down the toilet seat — with just me and my Dad here until Mum got back midweek Janet probably wouldn’t have expected to find it in any other position — and I got some nice warm blankets for Janet overnight.