The town basically came to a standstill.

1963 I think it was. And it was really cold. Water that had escaped from say an overflow on somebody's pipe on the side of their house. It would be like a great big icicle all the way down to the ground and it would stay there for weeks and weeks and weeks just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Because the water was still trying to get out and it would just freeze straight away. The trees just hung with huge icicles and everywhere was white and it just, it was just there for such a, such a long time. And yet people seem to manage better then than what they do now. Children managed to go to school, people managed to go to work. You know, it, it, it, it was a necessity because I don't think in those days sick pay wasn't the way to keep going and you needed your wages to carry on from week to week.

We were unprepared in those days.

We never had central heating. Consequently, you were cold, and I used to wake up in the morning and I was all covered in ice. From my breathing.

That's how cold it was. But when you're young, you shrug your shoulders and get on with it. So I used to drive one of the vans and uh we were working at the time at an aerodrome outside of Harryford doing chicken houses, wiring, and it used to take me about 2 hours to get there in the van. You get there, you'd do about 3 hours' work, and then you get in the van to come back home again because you didn't know whether you'd get back at the same time. I can remember going to work once and I had that many layers of clothing on that when the nice weather came and I was working at the same place some months later, the guy who lived there said to me, he said, Hmm, you're not that big, are you? You're not that big. I said, no, I had all these clothes on to keep warm. But it really was a hard winter, and you really had to make do with what you were able to get to continue continue your livelihood.

I don't think we've had a cold winter like that ever since.