Winter 1962-3 and Keeping Warm

This is included in the Met Office's list of "severe winters", and most of us were under snow from Boxing Day to early March. I had just turned 5 and as far as I was concerned it was great fun. My mother dressed me up warmly and put my legs in plastic bags held in place by elastic bands (which you can just see!). It was not so much fun for my parents. Our water supply pipe ran close to the surface and froze solid, so we had no water for weeks. My parents had to carry water from a newer house next door in buckets. I remember being bathed in two washing-up bowls, my feet in one and my bum in another. We had no central heating that really matched the description, just a couple of rusty radiators fed from a coal-fired boiler. The rest of the house was heated with open fires or electric heaters when you needed them. We would run upstairs and put an electric fire on in our bedrooms and a hot water bottle in the bed half an hour before we turned in, so it wouldn't be too unbearable. In those days everyone watched the pennies and lights were turned off if you didn't need them. That meant upstairs was dark, and worse, the light switch was upstairs. I used to run upstairs with my eyes shut in case I saw something scary up there. One night I came back down with two huge black eyes - I had run smack into a wall.