Frostquake: The Frozen Winter of 1962 and How Britain Emerged a Different Country
JULIET NICOLSON
(CHATTO & WINDUS, 368 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • tel 020 7799 4064

If we now associate “extreme weather events” with climate change hurtling towards us at breakneck speed, spare a thought for the great freeze of 1962–63, the coldest winter recorded since 1814. For 10 weeks from Boxing Day 1962 the snow fell silently, remorselessly, casting Britain into a chaos of power cuts, snow drifts, impassable roads and cancelled trains. In sub-zero temperatures, life limped on, milkmen resorting to skis to make deliveries and supplies dropped to the snowbound by helicopter.

The whole world seemed poised on the edge: the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis had just averted the threat of nuclear war, but was nuclear winter to take its place? Supplies were rationed, families separated, schools closed … sounds familiar? And for Juliet Nicolson and her brother, Adam, the icy temperatures did not just offer skating and snowball fights, they reflected the polite froideur of their parents’ marriage. The recent death of Vita Sackville-West left their grandfather Harold Nicolson flailing around in abject misery, as lost as the country seemed to be, with its aged and out-of-date Prime Minister, Harold Macmillian, and de Gaulle’s firm rebuff to its attempt to join the EEC. The coming of spring and the eventual thaw, however, would herald new ways of living, and new beginnings in the form of a baby sister born in April.