A beastly cold country: Britain in 1962

Like this author, I was happily snowbound at a beloved grandparent’s house during the big freeze that began on Boxing Day 1962 and ended in early March the following year. I was in Sussex, she at Sissinghurst in Kent. Juliet Nicolson, then eight, describes the morning of 27 December: ‘The snow was still there, turning the landmarks of the garden — the walls, lawns, statues, urns — into something unrecognisable but unified. The sight was beautiful.’ Her grandmother, Vita Sackville-West, had died in June, leaving the house to Nigel Nicolson, Juliet’s father. It was his family’s first Christmas there.

In The Perfect Summer: England 1911 Nicolson wrote of an earlier period on the cusp of social change. Perhaps the changes she describes in Frostquake would have happened anyway, but she imaginatively uses that ten-week freeze to highlight many of Britain’s then moribund laws and attitudes and their imminent collapse: the criminalisation of homosexuality, the acceptance of casual racism — landlords stating ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ — and the reluctance of the press to expose the misdeeds of the powerful.