The Untimely Demise of a Snowman

My earliest memory is of riding on my father’s shoulders through a crowded street on a late afternoon. It was some kind of street fair—maybe Guy Fawkes Day. I could not have been much more than three years old. My father handed me a tuppence coin and had me reach up and put it in a copper kettle that was hanging above my head from a pole extended into the street from a shop front. As I dropped the coin in the kettle a man passed us on stilts and I marveled at this as he passed.

Most of my memories of early childhood are just fragments such as this. My general impression was of a drab and gray post-war England, almost Dickensian in its dreariness. I remember the eccentric people for which the country is so well-known. There was a man always hanging about the market who had a mouse that would run around the brim of his hat, an organ grinder always playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” and various lunatics standing on soap boxes in the park ranting about politics.

I remember one man on a soap box shouting that the world was flat and that it was heresy to think otherwise. This didn’t make sense even to a very young boy like me. I remember asking my dad on a weekend excursion to Brighton how anybody could believe the world was flat.

I remember going to the market almost every week with my mother and my younger brother. Often she would drag us hurriedly back home because she had heard the siren of a firetruck headed in the direction of our house on Windsor Road and was afraid she had forgotten the kettle on the stove or left the iron on or was in tears after seeing my father with one of his girlfriends on the back of his scooter.

On the corner of our street there was a small shop where my mother would stop to buy sundries and occasionally treat us to Kit Kat bars. There were the Friday nights my father would come home with a rolled-up bundle of newspaper, which he would put on the kitchen table and my mother would open to reveal a steaming pile of fish and chips.

There are other more extensive memories that have stayed with me, maybe because they were more traumatic. One such memory was of the time our pet rabbit escaped because my brother had left the door of the hutch open. I remember my father yelling at my brother, who was in tears, threatening to make him spend the night in the hutch. My brother at the time was actually small enough to fit in the hutch, but my mother interceded on his behalf.

Another memory was of a snowstorm in early January and the snowman my father, brother and I built. The snow had fallen steadily through the previous night and we woke to find half a foot of snow blanketing the ground. I remember the three of us rolling big balls of snow and my father stacking them on top of one another. We added lumps of coal for eyes and buttons, a scarf around his neck and we stuck one of my father’s pipes in his mouth. My father then wrote “HAPPY NEW YEAR” with India ink on him.

The snowman before his untimely demise.

We were so proud of that snowman. He was taller than my mother and father and we received many compliments on it from the neighbors. The sad part of the story comes later that evening when we were sitting around the dinner table and heard yelling, thuds and the clanging of metal against our iron fence. The whole family raced to the front window to find a man brandishing a snow shovel hacking apart our snowman screaming “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” My father chased him away but of course it was too late. The snowman was by then completely obliterated and my brother and I were sobbing uncontrollably and, again, my father tried to explain such lunacy.