'Haven't you seen snow before?' schoolmasters used to ask sarcastically, if snow began to fall during a lesson and bolder boys than me would run to the windows to watch.
One could ask the same question of Southern Railways, or of London Buses. The entire Roper family is confined to Seaford. My workplace is shut, son's college is closed, but in any case there's no train to take him to Lewes, and my daughter's school is shut.

Even at my advanced age, when it snows, I can believe I have never seen it before, especially in the first few hours.
I was eight in the great freeze of 1963. My father bought, though my mother ridiculed him, some snow chains for the car. A GP, he could not afford to be immobile and it was characteristic of his devotion to his parents to take this precaution,. But the chains took hours to fit, and to remove, and I think for most of the time they went unused. He went on his rounds nevertheless. I suppose many of his elderly patients must have died during that period, though he would never have discussed it in front of us or, I suspect, even with my mother.
At school the caretaker would flood a section of the playground with water from a hose early in the morning, so that by break-time, there were areas of ice for us to make slides. The game must have died out, for one never sees children doing it now. The technique is simple: choose a patch of icy ground on a tarmac surface and by running at it, and sliding over it, make it sufficiently slippery. Once there is a run of sufficient length of compacted ice and snow, the sliding can begin. After a run-up, much the same as a bowler’s to deliver a ball to a batsman, one turns, so one's feet are at right-angles to the direction of travel , and, with arms out to keep balance, slides as far as one can.
On the return to 3α’s class-room, our shorts would be soaked, for even in this winter, we continued to wear shorts. To this day I do not feel the cold much in my legs, and ran across the downs yesterday in shorts. These shorts were kept up by an elasticated belt in the school colours with a snake fastening. Socks were long, and terminated at the top by a band of the same purple and black and over a grey shirt we would wear a similarly trimmed v-necked pullover, and round our necks the school tie.
Were we cold? I only remember feeling very cold on games afternoons, and that probably because, pale young aesthete that I was, I did not participate with any great enthusiasm. If I had ‘got stuck in', as masters would urge me, I might have kept warmer.
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