The Willow Pond. Mervyn Linford
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The smithy’s contract between Vulcan, Jove and himself had been fulfilled, and we were the unfortunate recipients. If running away could by any stretch of the imagination be called an art-form, then it goes without saying that we’d perfected it. We were once again about to experience that strange and somewhat disorientating thrill of high-speed fog jogging. To see one’s pursuer in the light of day is frightening enough but to be continually looking over one’s retreating shoulder into the fog-shrouded world of monstrous possibilities is petrifying. Waves of diffusing sunlight entered the space-time continuum of the enveloping foliage. Throughout the hurtling track of our converging trajectories the constellated glitter of condensing droplets followed our ill-starred progress. At a certain point in the proceedings the combined force of our accelerating mass crossed the horizon of that meteoric event and we vanished into breathless singularity.
After the fog came the first frosty days, those hoary outriders of the big snowed battalions themselves. Short-lived substitute that they usually turned out to be we nevertheless made the most of them. In those days of hot-water bottles and single glazing, winter windows - so our memories seem to tell us - were always opaque. Waking to a yellow painted bedroom and white frosted glass, I often fancied myself as the coiled element in a particularly drowsy light bulb. Having been switched on and illuminated by the wonders of whiteness, getting up was easier than usual. Rubbing the fern patterned glass with benumbed fingers the world outside was soon to be exposed. Gardens at that time of year were very much the domain of Brussels sprouts. Come on admit it, when you think of frost don’t Brussels sprouts come leaping to mind? And if not, why not? They should do if for no other reason than Christmas dinners depend on the coincidence. I digress. Out there in the beak-bending answer to the name of grass, worms - with all the elasticity of six-inch nails - were for once in their wriggle-less lives safe from the marauding instincts of blackbirds and thrushes. That resplendent, shivering expanse - denied the luxury of deckchairs and daisies - was to minds of the lowest degree - of which I include my own - portentous of frozen puddles. They in turn conjured the rosy, glissading images of those scarf wearing and be-muffled skaters so inspiringly and eagerly depicted by the Victorian artist. Where I lived there existed some of the biggest puddles in the universe. Even the ever-revolving swathe of the Milky Way itself paled into insignificance when compared with those hyper-galactic watercourses. Understandably breakfast was some thing to be skated through. “D’you wan’t ‘ot or cold milk wiv yer cornflakes,” queried the lady of the house. “Cold please,” I blurted. “But yer always hav’ ‘ot milk,” she continued. “Well yes, but I fancy cold fer a change,” I mediated. “What on a frosty mornin’ like this,” she challenged. What was the use, how could you tell a grown-up that that was precisely the reason why! Our two minds had the same polarity. On the surface there was everything in common but the closer and more often the contact the greater the repulsion. Age and understanding continually strove to drive us apart. The great Magnet in the sky had deemed it necessary that attraction was okay up to a point but that eventually every little iron filing had to find its own place in the pattern of things. “Yer can’t go out yet, yer hav’n’t finished yer breakfast,” she implored. But alas the glint, Boreal frost-smith of the Pole had drawn my southern soul towards his craft. “I won’t be long,” I remonstrated, while all the time gathering my frictionless momentum. At the end of the long slide the Aurora awaited. And who was I to deny the charge of that particular electronic power?
The redoubtable Eddy and I found ourselves in that proverbial winter-wonderland so pertinent even now to the Peter Pans amongst us. The fairy-dust of a glittering winter’s night had transformed the bleak reality of a dull and leafless landscape into the dazzling intensity of a glacial Never-Never-Land. A dispersing mist had left its frozen residue on the trees and hedgerows. The bifurcating tips of white-furred branches bristled in the diffuse sunlight. Spicules of shimmering ice drifted like dust-motes in the wake of alighting birds. Along the hedgerows the radial spokes of shivering cobwebs shone into infinite regression with all the sparkle of a set of diminishing solar-wheels. There, in that eerily candescent world of blue and white and gold, was the El Dorado so often found in the gilt-edged dreams of the eternal slide-maker. As always when one travels along the slippery paths of nostalgia, wish and outcome are bound to coincide. In the shape of the innumerable corrugated ruts to be found in the unmade roads of that bucolic yester world the Promised Land was encountered. Like manna from the very heavens the Ice Queen had performed her perennial miracle. The slides already in place were both long enough and wide enough for our slithering purposes. All that was needed was polish. Something that has to be said - that in our case at least - was in rather short supply. However, the attempt was made. Tentatively at first, like apprentice tightrope walkers, arms outstretched, in a teetering file of two, we inched along the frozen rut. Slowly, on gaining confidence, we gathered pace. Our erstwhile vacillations were forgotten. A run-up was selected and the trampled grass partially defrosted. From a flying start, ice and shoe-leather came together in unison. At first two-footed with the occasional twirl, then at a crouch, then on one leg, and then inevitably head over heels in a temporarily ego shattering tumble. Soon, inured against any amount of derisory laughter, an unwarranted optimism regarding one’s capabilities concerning the sports d’hiver was attained. The fairy-dust itself was about to be transformed into a shower of shooting stars as the headlong giggling speed skaters inevitably became head-bumped sprawling imbeciles in an avalanche of tears. Those two bruised and battered athletes of Olympian stature were ready to settle for bronze. Peter Pan was in danger of growing up, El Dorado had been confused with iron pyrites and the golden beginnings of that crystalline day of enchantment had ended up by being tarnished with blood and abrasions.
If we were really lucky the first snows of winter came before Christmas, or even more rarely during the holidays themselves. But in truth they hardly ever came at all. The prevailing misery of North-Atlantic depressions and warm fronts were the unwanted and dispiriting prophecies of gloom precipitating from the despised mouths of meteorologists. Rain and wind, wind and rain. Rain and more rain. Wind and more wind. That was the continuous sorry track of our southwesterly existence. Respite came in the form of fitful ridges of anticyclonic hope, tantalizingly promising, but never delivering one speck of frost from the blue-moon rarity of their starlit nights. In that evergreen, ever remembered, time of year, grass occasionally grew, trees budded-up for spring and winter-greens sprouted from the gardens like the mocking tongues of self-righteous Martians. But Christmas was coming and the clangorous honking from the fat-yarded, feathery smallholdings proved that the geese were portentously aware of the fact. My major solitary pursuit of the season was window gazing. Whether the windows in question were the tree-lit and tinselled ones of the domestic hearth or the eye for the main-chance glittering transparencies of commercial insincerity, it didn’t matter much. Whenever freed from the shackles of familial restraint and allowed to venture out into the darkness on my own, I could be seen wandering the sublunary December streets like the lost and fallen image of Bethlehem’s most celebrated astronomical occurrence. Even now, thinking of such simple things as coal-eyed, carrot-nosed snowmen, puffs of cotton-wool, stuck and askew, against plate-glass windows, or star-spangled revolving mobiles, brings the whole ethereal event sharply back into focus. Then, there was wonder indeed. Walking those magical streets I inhabited a dimension only to be returned to fleetingly in those moments of heightened awareness that age and a surfeit of alcohol allow. Without the aid of any known stimulant to man, other than the innate hallucinogens of spontaneity and relative innocence, the gateways of perception were open. Angels were indeed possible, conceptions could have been immaculate, and even the enforced dogma and doctrine of my hair-shirt upbringing seemed for once founded on some unshakable truth.
The time for wishes had arrived. Kitchens themselves partook of the season and became just as otherworldly. The spice-laden mixtures were stirred. Eyes closed and supplications made. If the letter to Father Christmas failed, this would surely do the trick. Puddings the size of cannonballs were swaddled in muslin and immersed in great bubbling copper cauldrons. Ovens were racked from top to bottom with mince pies and sausage rolls. Smells were exotic and intoxicating, cinnamon and sherry, brandy and cloves. Smells that any self-respecting Bisto Kid would follow unflinchingly to the ends of the universe. Drunk on the yuletide elixirs I watched as the icing was poured, patted and scrolled