Snow Day

With all this beautifully disruptive and prohibitive snow about, I've been reminded on several occasions of one of my favourite books.

Philip Larkin's A Girl In Winter is a vivid portrait of England and a warming love story that unfolds slowly and sensuously. I'd like to write a review so that I could explain just why I think this novel is worth reading but, as I don't have time, I'll have to settle for sharing a meteorologically relevant passage. This is in fact the book's opening:

There had been no more snow during the night, but because the frost continued so that the drifts lay where they had fallen, people told each other there was more to come. And when it grew lighter, it seemed that they were right, for there was no sun, only one vast shell of cloud over the fields and woods. In contrast to the snow the sky looked brown. Indeed, without the snow the morning would have resembled a January nightfall, for what light there was seemed to rise from it.

It lay in ditches and in hollows in the fields, where only birds walked. In some lanes the wind had swept it up faultlessly to the very tops of the hedges. Villages were cut off until gangs of men could clear a passage on the roads; the labourers could not go out to work, and on the aerodromes near these villages all flying remained cancelled. People who lay ill in bed could see the shine off the ceilings in their rooms, and a puppy confronted with it for the first time howled and crept under the water-butt. The out-houses were roughly powdered down the windward side, the fences were half-submerged like breakwaters; the whole landscape was so white and still it might have been a formal painting.

Lest you be put off reading it for fear it'd only make you feel colder, I can reassure you that a large, central part of the book takes place in the summer. I'll end with an extract from that section and the advice that, if you can get hold of a copy, you should put on some extra socks, make a cup of tea, and indulge yourself with Larkin's lovely and unaffected prose.

The morning when she came to England for the first time had been still and hot: not an accidental fine day, but one of a series that had already lasted a week. Each had seemed more flawless than the one before it, as if in a their slow gathering of depth and placidity they were progressing towards perfection. The sky was deep blue as if made richer by the endless recession of past summers: the sea smooth, and when a wave lifted the sun shone through it as through a transparent green window. She walked to and fro across the sharp shadows on the deck, noticing how the deck and all the ropes had been drenched in sea-water and whitened in the sun.

It was incredible that she should be there at all.