Cambridge 1958-1962

Chronicled below are some of my father’s earliest infidelities from his unpublished autobiography. It would seem that he recorded only the most memorable dalliances, hinting at others perhaps less interesting. His extramarital activities seemed to dawn with the new decade of the 1960s and read something like a bad British comedy of the period or an Austin Powers-type spoof. My father and mother had moved to Cambridge so that my father could get his masters and doctorate, which, as his memoirs reveal, took him at lot longer than it should have.

Mary Ann was seven months pregnant when we sailed August 15th on the TSS New York out of Manhattan for Southampton. Mary Ann’s parents would come over just before the baby was due—which was not until the beginning of October. Michaelmas Term, 1958 would commence on October 4th—the day Jeff was born.

We stayed in a little bed & breakfast place on Trumpington Street until we found a furnished house through January’s, the estate agents. Given our young ages and lack of experience, in addition to being new parents, my mother agreed to supplement our income, if needed. We found a lovely semi-detached four-bedroom house on Windsor Road—just off the Histon and Huntingdon Roads north of town. The rent was 8 guineas ($25) a week, but I would need a bike or a scooter to get around.

It was a spacious place, which required no further furniture—except some space heaters (it was not centrally heated). Two of the bedrooms were of decent size (12'x14'), the front would be the master bedroom, the rear would make a decent study; the remaining two were rather small (only 6'x9'), but good enough for a nursery and a box room. Downstairs there was a front sitting room—which would be our dining room—and a back sitting room with french doors opening onto a large garden. There was a smallish kitchen with an antique gas stove and an ancient fridge, and there was also a larder. Out back, abutting the garage, was a coal shed which also had an outside toilet (although there was one toilet and one bathroom upstairs on the second floor.) The structure was shared with a neighboring house having the same amenities. It was considered solid, if not upper middle class as evidenced by the fact that our neighbor, Doug Howarth, was Manager of the local Legal & General office, one of the country’s insurance companies. He had a wife and three children (two sons and a daughter), pre-teens. Our Estate Agent, as it turned out, also had a wife who gave birth at the same place and on the same date as Jeff.

Our life in Cambridge was one of stereotypical domestic bliss. We lived fairly well due to a favorable exchange rate—and financial help from my mother. Mary Ann became pregnant with Mark in February following Jeff’s birth; the boys would be 13 months apart. Slowly the trappings of family life were surrounding me.

In the meantime, Cambridge University’s Committee for the History & Philosophy of Science was busy creating a graduate program in the subject. The first students would be students who wanted to become science teachers in secondary schools, and wanted an additional feather in their cap. But it was difficult for the graduate school to attract competent people versed in specific sciences. It was difficult to train historians sufficiently in the sciences for them to do competent graduate work in their history, but seemed less so to train scientists in the methods of history. This is particularly so as it is the task of every would-be graduate student in the science to research the history of his intended area of research. So, the student of proven competence in a scientific field was the desired candidate to do grad work in the History of Science. As a result, I was proselytized by the resident Historians of Science, namely, A. Rupert Hall of Christ’s and Sydney Smith of St. Catharine’s, to do graduate work in the History of Biology. To do so, I would have to attend lectures, supervisions, and tutorials for the graduate Diploma in the History and Philosophy of Science; but to make the switch over more palatable, I was told that successful attainment of the Diploma would pretty much guarantee my acceptance as a graduate student in the History of Science and would also be allowed to count towards 3 of the 9 required semesters towards a Ph.D. I did so in June 1959.

In the spring, at Mary Ann’s suggestion, I wrote to her old Biology Professor at Northern Michigan College (now University) about a summer school teaching position. He, in turn, passed on my letter, to another Professor—Holmes Boynton—who, in turn, offered me a job for that summer of 1959. It didn’t offer much pay, but it was enough to pay all our passages back to the upper peninsula of Michigan, where Mary Ann’s parents lived; and where our costs would be negligible and it would only be a 65-minute drive to Marquette from Michigamme.

The Northern position was an NSA-sponsored summer Institute for Teachers of the Sciences. Most of the attendees were high school science teachers, most of the lecturers were visitors. There were also a number of regular college students in attendance that summer, many of them living in the dorms. I became friendly with many of them. I participated in several evening bull sessions with the students wherein I told of my own exploits at UCSB and encouraged one and all to “Question Authority.” Well, word got back to Boynton that I was promulgating subversion among Northern students and I was summarily called in—this after 2½ weeks of the session—and told that my services would now no longer needed. I was given my full pay as severance and there I was, fired from my first job. As this was, apparently, not going to affect my career, I could have cared less, but I was embarrassed. I returned, somewhat chastened, to Cambridge, and the beginning of a graduate career.

My biggest initial help came from Dr. Sydney Smith, Tutor in Natural Sciences at St. Catharine’s, University Lecturer in Embryology, and member of the History & Philosophy of Science Committee. Sydney was always helpful, but he was equally on an on-going ego trip. He was a relative non-achiever—though he did excellent work—who had to make it up by demeaning those under him. He incessantly told us what relatively uneducated, sometimes stupid, always ignorant, lot we were. Nonetheless, out of these meetings, we did obtain vital—and helpful—information.

But Sydney did introduce me to The Whim, Cambridge’s venerable (now gone—replaced by a Liberty store) tea-room. Many an hour was spent talking, visiting, and, occasionally, picking up girls there. I can remember a whole range of characters from there, from Elie Zahar, now LSE’s eminent philosopher of science, to Ivan the Terrible Driving Instructor. The latter was a local Englishman who so very much wanted to be part of our “crowd;” he also recognized the opportunities that we had found at the Whim for picking up girls. Ivan would invariably come in at tea-time and plop himself down with one of us. But when an attractive group of girls would come in, this gaunt and somewhat thick-witted chap would hop up and, uninvited, join their table. Ivan was the only man who I believed could clear out the entire place, simply by hopping from table to table and precipitating hurried departures!

Two elderly sisters ran The Whim and they had their decided favorites among the regulars; if you were polite and reasonably well-dressed and passed the time of day with them, you were admitted to their sanctum. When they could no longer make a go of the place in the face of Caius’ mounting rent increases; and when no one person or institution stepped forward to preserves this landmark, it went the way of so many Cambridge places: it fell to a local extension of a chain store. Laura Ashley, Liberty, Dillon’s, Marks & Spencer and the Body Shop; all have pushed out local store owners by paying the exorbitant rents the College-landlords have demanded. Pubs like the Bath and the Eagle have been bought and renovated almost beyond recognition—and even serve pizza as pub-grub! The “Crit” as the Criterion pub was known, nestled in the Arts Cinema passageway, was the handwriting on the wall; then the Still & Sugarloaf, then the Rose on Rose Crescent—and so it goes, or, went.

My principal friends in Cambridge from 1958-1962 were, among students—notably the St. Cat’s trio of Peter Lomas, Alaba Akinsete (from Nigeria), B. K. Wong (from Malaysia), Alun Steer—reading German at St. Johns and after whom I named my second son—and various “townies,” such as Janet and Brian Legg, she the Administrative Secretary of my department, he a Cambridge United footballer—and then there was Elie and Johanna Zahar, he a brilliant undergraduate mathematician, and she a German student at the Tech.

During my first academic year, my mentor Sydney Smith—embryologist and part-time historian of biology—took me under his wing as a fellow Darwin scholar and showed me around the Darwiniana at the University. There were some items to be found at the Botany School at the Sedgwick Avenue site; the reason for this being that Darwin had left most of his scientific collections to his botanist son, Francis who had become a professor of botany at the University. Botanical research papers, reprints, collections, found their way here. Darwin’s personal library, some family letters and papers, zoological specimens and collections remained at Down House in Kent, which had been preserved and maintained by the College of Physicians and Surgeons. It had been turned into a school shortly after Emma Darwin’s death, but reverted to the public domain in the late 20s and now stands much as the Darwins had left it in the 19th Century. The University Library contains Darwin’s papers, letters and manuscripts.

Most important for me personally, was Dr. Smith’s taking me to the Botany School Library. There, some 9' up along the topmost shelf along one corner wall was a 15' line of manila-wrapped, string-tied packets of 3"-4" thick book-sized bundles. Dr. Smith invited me to ascend the library ladder and, pointing to the rightmost side, suggested that I open one. They were offprints of scientific periodical articles belonging to Sir Francis Darwin. Then, finding much satisfaction in this smug game of hide-and-seek, he beckoned me to move a little further to my left and retrieve another bundle. I soon had packets of articles that had been collected by both Francis and his more illustrious father; a little further to the left and I was looking at Darwin’s own personal reprint collection. Containing over a 1,000 books and journal articles, it also contained a total of over ¼ million words of Darwin’s holograph annotations. This was to be the researcher’s gold mine and was to form the basis for my doctoral dissertation! I had the material with which to assay the direct influence of contemporary sources upon Darwin and his ideas! This was handed to me by Dr. Smith and became the center around which my research revolved.

My social life revolved around the Leggs, Alun Steer and his Yugoslavia girlfriend, Nuja, my journalistic efforts (held over from my Santa Barbara days) and my college friends. Through my friend Alaba (Vincent) Akinsete at Cat’s I met Bittan (Mai-Britt) Hallquist, a Swedish student studying English in Cambridge. We became good friends, having had many lunches, etc., together with the boys from Cat’s, at The Gardenia, The Whim, The Copper Kettle, and all those other places that students piss away their indolent hours when they should be studying. Socio-sexually inexperienced that I was, I enjoyed the attentions of Bittan. I was most curious about Sweden. So, with Alun Steer having gone off to Germany to study for the Michaelmas term of 1960 and his heading home to England for Christmas, I contrived a little trip to the Continent: from Tilbury to Gothenberg, Sweden via North Sea ferry, thence by train to Stockholm, where I would then train down the 20 miles to see Bittan in Tumba, then back up to Stockholm and then train, via Copenhagen to Hamburg, where I would meet up with Alun and then we’d return home to England on a student train, arriving on December 23rd. It was an interesting trip—Mary Ann making no objection, providing I was back before Christmas.

Bittan met me, along with heavily falling snow, when I arrived at the station in Tumba. She told me it was Santa Lucia night and there would be a small festival down at the local school. This was the formal arrival of winter, the festival of lights, wherein one 13-year-old school girl who’d been elected to the role of Lucia, would lead a candlelight procession from one part of town down to the school. This was to be followed by a dinner of nearly all the adults in the town. It was quite impressive to see the strings of hand-held candles coming from all the different lanes, converging on the High Street and moving en masse down to the school. Dinner was quite gay and I was one of the centers of attraction. I was taught how to skål and consumed many of the little chilled shots of aquavit. The next day Bittan offered to accompany me up to Stockholm and spend my last day in Stockholm with me before I left on the train to Copenhagen. It was a fun day and we ended up at the Regina Hotel, a modest place in the center of town. We each got single rooms—on different floors. We said a warm farewell at the train station the following day—I would be in Copenhagen by late afternoon.

I can’t remember much about Copenhagen and Hamburg except that I knew no one in the former and Alan was not very helpful, socially, in the latter. We enjoyed several evenings in the student beer cellars and I was introduced to several English-speaking students. I remember but one problem with the English-German translating. There was this young couple, Hans and Gerda, quite attractive, in their mid-20s. They seemed quite attached and quite vivacious. In an effort to get to know them better I asked them how long they had been “going together.” What I didn’t know was that the term, translated literally into German, means “having sexual intercourse”—as in “how long have the cow and bull been going together?” There was a hushed pause in the conversation, the two looked at each other, blushed visibly, then burst out laughing. They realized that my question, quite innocent, had missed its meaning in translation. My puzzlement in their laughter was allayed by Alun’s explanation and the good times continued.

As it turned out, Alun had much work undone and he would be unable to accompany me back to England. I was disappointed at having to make the long haul back on my own. But he introduced me to three Art students who were travelling in that direction, so I would have some companionship. They were an Italian, an Englishman, and a German—it looked like, with my French, we had all the language bases covered, if needed.

I remembered we arrived at the Hamburg railway station on the day of our travel quite late at night. It seemed quite eerie and foreboding to me; winter, late night, foreign country. And the German love of uniforms. It seemed that even the S-Bahn conductors looked like SS men in their black uniforms with their peaked caps. I felt like I was in an old black & white B movie and expected Conrad Veidt to emerge any minute in a Gestapo uniform. The German I heard in the background certainly helped to set the mood.

The bahnhof was quiet, with a moderate number of people; one or two had laid out on the long benches in the waiting room, at least one sound asleep. The four of us students sat on a bench opposite the sleeper, keeping our eye on the electric notice board above for the platform number of our train to Dunquerque.

All of a sudden—so it seemed—the double swinging doors on the street side of the waiting room burst open and two black-uniformed policemen came striding into the room. At that point I felt my Jewish blood curdling in my veins—it was the 1940s again and they were surely looking for me!

They had black leather boots on and they strode down either side of the main central aisle, glaring down at each person waiting. As they reached our aisle—I was already feeling so guilty; of something—in one alarming swoop the cop had unleashed his billy club and THWACK! thumped a reclined sleeper on the soles of his shoes. He shot up in an instant—God knows if he had had a heart condition he would have died of a coronary right then and there! I could see from the frozen expressions of my pals that they shared my terrified thoughts. We all felt like camp escapees trying to make our way out of Nazi Germany: the railway station waiting room in the dead of a winter night was the perfect setting. I really expected the cop to approach me and demand to see my “papers;” but they passed on, scrambling another sleeper and, seemingly appropriately, escorting him out of the station. We sighed and visibly relaxed when the announcement board indicated our train’s platform and we rushed for it.

We were lucky that the train was not crowded. We split up, three of us in one compartment, the Italian Franco, the Englishman Bob, and I in one compartment and our other friend had one all to himself for the time being.

As the train trundled Westward through the night, we quickly learned that the best way to guarantee our privacy was to draw the three curtains on the aisle side of the compartment—one on each side of the sliding door and one on the door itself. We found that the seats slid slightly forward, allowing them to recline at about 30º and thus, if there was no one in the seat opposite, it would make a veritable bed. Unfortunately, there was no lock on the sliding door of the compartment, so at nearly every stop someone noisily slid open our door and jolted us awake; no doubt stirring the recent memory of jackbooted Gestapo agents catching us at last!

Finally, around 2:30 a.m. Franco got the bright idea of resting the foot of his left leg and propping it up against the door lever. By straightening out his leg he created a virtual bar against the opening of the door. The way some travelling schweinhunds responded to this erstwhile challenge by wrestling with the unopenable door was something to behold. At one point I imagined three or four putting their muscles together in an effort to get inside! Obviously, there was little peace and precious little rest on that trip. By 7:30 a.m. with what looked to be the influx of commuters as we crossed into Belgium, someone had summoned the conductor to “unlock” our compartment and we were aggressively rousted into sitting positions as three grumbling German commuters slammed the now-empty seats upright and plopped themselves into their seats, glaring at us student-bums all the while.

Apparently, the train-ferry connection was not too well planned, for we were told that the ferry was just leaving as we pulled into the dockside siding. Being holiday time, all the ferries were booked to capacity and thus, if we missed this one, there was no telling when the hell we’d ever get off the continent. As it was we had to jump onto a moving ferry. With the dangerous gap already widening, I almost had second thoughts, but my wife and kids sitting expectantly around a Christmas tree flashed in my mind and I leapt onto the ferry. I was home by late afternoon of the 23rd.

The year 1960 ended and all seemed quite normal on Windsor Road. My research was proceeding slowly but surely. We were living fairly comfortably on $300 a month; paying as we were only $108 for the rental of our four-bedroom furnished house.

We were able to entertain, even throwing the occasional party for groups of our friends: the Jocks of Christs and the Mummers—two totally and diametrically opposite social groups. Rugby players like Vic Harding, Dave MacSweeny, Donald MacBean, Ron Hoare, and embryonic actors and comedians from the Mummers and the A. D. C.

Much to the occasional chagrin of my bourgeois neighbors—who had to look out their windows in the morning to see what looked like the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme with bodies strewn everywhere.

Towards the summer of 1961 I had begun to feel that I was letting myself get too out of shape. To that end I inveigled soccer-playing Brian Legg to play whiffle ball with me in our backyard, against the side of our garage and I began a diet. By the beginning of term I had gone from about 208 lbs. down to 154—9 lbs. below my ideal weight. By Christmas I would treat myself to a host of new clothes.

That December of 1961, Mary Ann and I decided that she would return home for Christmas in Michigan with the boys. As I was to be finished with my dissertation by June, I could fly back for good at the beginning of summer. To that end, I secured myself a small flat on the 3rd floor of a friend’s house on Huntingdon Road, just around the corner from Windsor Road. This was the house of Maurice and Beryl Frost, who I got to know through Maurice’s job as Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages. There was just the two of them and their five-year-old daughter in a big Victorian house. I had just run into Maurice on the street and he looked terrible. He had lost about 50 lbs. due to the sudden onset of Diabetes. He had also lost his job. It being a dead-end position, he was not fit for anything really but another civil service job—and there weren’t any of those going around. Beryl worked as a secretary/accountant for a local dairy; they were only just scraping by at the time. When I mentioned that I would be moving out of Windsor Road and still wanting to stay for another six months in Cambridge, the idea came to Maurice that he could solve both our problems by renting me the 3rd floor two-room flat at the top of his house and £2 a week seemed good for both of us. All I needed to bring was a desk, a couple of kerosene heaters, books, bedclothes, typewriter, a gas cooking ring and a couple of utensils.

I turned the two small rooms into a cozy little apartment. I brought a large carpet which effectively became wall-to-wall in the front sitting room. I had a couch, a desk and chair, a coffee table and a couple of lamps. The heater which had heated the Windsor Road living room made the small sitting room quite toasty. In the other room was the big double bed, a bureau and a night table. In the hall landing there was a large cupboard where I kept utensils, crockery, and light food.

I had flown back to America with my family, intending to return on New Year’s Eve. The first and only dance party at the International Centre on Trinity Street was to be a New Year’s party—and I didn’t want to miss it, replete with new duds and a slender 154 lb. body. I can still remember that party. The place was packed—wall to wall with attractive Scandinavian girls—and all my “gunslinger” pals. I was like a kid locked in a candy store! They even managed to serve drinks that night—something one could normally never get at the Centre.

The only girl I remember from that night was Tula, a slight brassy Finnish girl. She was a lusty thing who, true-to-form, drank much that night. She weighed in at about 90 lbs. and was so limp from inebriation that I found it easier to dance with her by carrying her entire weight so her feet never touched the dance floor. It was like making love vertically. I was in seventh heaven! This was a token of things to come!

I think I spent nearly every day of the first five months of 1962 in the Centre. The lunch cafeteria was my venue; so much so that Anita, the German cook, had become an ally of mine as the place became my living room.

I can even remember the night, having come home after a particularly wild evening, seen my desktop full of uncompleted work and, opening the desk drawer, swept everything on top into it, not to open it again for six months!

One of my more memorable affairs was with the Coroner’s wife. This woman’s husband had also hoped to become Cambridge’s next mayor. They lived around the corner from where I was living and I had met her on one of our many joint appearances at Lloyd’s Bank. She was both flirtatious and chatty—she was then about 36 years old, Irish, with dark hair and sparkling, come-hither eyes. I can remember, shortly after Mary Ann left, running across her and, engaging her in conversation over a coffee at the Kenya coffee house, I invited her to come ’round and see how students live. As it was but a two-minute walk from her house, she did so on the following day. It was not a difficult conquest; indeed, I was the seducee! It was chiefly memorable for the fact that she kept blurting out, at the most inappropriate times, “Do you know what my husband would do if he ever caught us?!” Or, at the moment of orgasmic truth ... “My husband is a violent man!” I vowed then to leave this neurotic woman alone thereafter and to have more respect where I parked my Willy! As Coroner, I could just see him standing over my dead body—having been murdered by this irate husband—and stating: “Death by Misadventure.” I was definitely going to give that woman a pass.

That winter I was, as they say, a “slut”. I remember dating a little Finnish bird called Eino. I had been trying, for some weeks, to get into her pants, unsuccessfully. One evening, on what I determined would be our last Platonic date, we went to a party at Pete Andres’ on Emmanuel Road and the liquor, as usual, was flowing like water. I had even brought my own bottle of Vodka which I had stuck to chill in his fridge.

In the course of the evening the effect of all the alcohol brought on an “I don’t give a damn” attitude towards this girl. I had resigned myself to never enjoying her slim dancer’s body carnally. I pointedly let her dance with any guy who asked her, and enjoyed dances with a few nubile beauties myself—almost to the point of ignoring her. This had the unexpected but much desired effect of getting her competitive dander up and, after another half-an-hour she insisted that we leave. I told her she could find a cab across the street at the Drummer Street bus station, but she leaned into me, pulling on my lapel, and whispered “I want you to take me back to your place!” She had decided. I heard the victory bell go off in my head, and, draining my last water glass of vodka, grabbed her and steered her out of the busy party and out, onto my scooter, and vroomed off to Huntingdon Road. The cold night air on the scooter ride really caused the effect of the vodka to take hold on both of us; by the time we dismounted in front of the house, I wasn’t quite sure that I could make the long flights up to the 3rd floor. It was bone-chilling cold and I would be lured up those stairs by the thought of my warm toasty, over-heated apartment.

When I got to my landing I lurched directly into the bedroom and, pulling off my clothes in one big go, I collapsed onto the bed. Eino was miffed at the idea of having committed herself to this act, she was going to have to forego any notions of romantic foreplay. I was totally drunk and getting less compos mentis by the minute. She hovered over the bed with me lying prostrate in it looking quite perturbed as she shucked off her coat and blouse. The room started swimming around me as I looked up at her luscious body and well-formed breasts and saw her unfastening her dress. As it slid to the floor and she slid her panties down to her ankles (thank God for the over-heated room!), I realized that nothing but 20 miles of bad neural road lay between my eager brain and my sleeping Willy!

Could I summon up the roving molecules of hormonal chemistry? Could I somehow direct them to the appropriate source? That was the question. Obviously, Willy was not being a stand-up guy. And Eino, sure that her disrobing gestures would have had the appropriate effect, was not too happy with the flaccid results.

With a slight shrug, she seemed to resign herself to a more overt form of stimulation and slid in and down on top of me, running her hands all over my bod. I kept repeating in my mind this little prayer ...” God, if you love me, you’ll make me sober. Just a little sober; just get my blood to the right parts; just for ten minutes. God make me sober.” But this was not to be the case; there was a backlog of gastric alcohol that was still entering my blood and the latter was not going anywhere useful. Eino was getting more and more passionate. I could feel her body on mine getting hotter and hotter; she was no paragon of sobriety—yet the alcohol was having the effect on her that I had been praying it would have on me. The 20 miles of bad road between brain and schlong was stretching into 40, or was totally blocked—fellatio even by a sexually dedicated Brigitte Bardot would have had no effect. Eino tried for about a quarter of an hour: she would have rubbed Willy raw if I hadn’t told her to forget it. We’d try it in the morning I assured her.

Then something went click in her mind; and her overheated and dedicated passion turned to quiet rage. She jumped out of the bed and, with me mumbling my fervent tumescent mantra, proceeded to dress herself. But my mind swam as the room whirled and my eyes circled helplessly in their sockets. I could barely discern that delicious body as it was being covered up. Talk about frustration!

I begged her to stay, promising untold ecstasies in a few hours, but she wasn’t having any of it. She turned, put on her jacket, and, before she left, she strode over to the window, threw it fully open, and looked out, cursing that it was starting to snow and she was about half-a-mile from home. She strode out, slamming the door, not having shut the wide-open window in the face of what has since held to be Cambridge’s worst winter storm in this century! Outside, and faced with the prospect of a long, freezing walk home in the snow, she found some satisfaction in leaning down and letting the air out of both tires of my scooter.

In the morning I opened my eyes and looked down at my uncovered body. It was blue! I couldn’t believe it! I could barely move: I was suffering from exposure. My head was pounding, that was how I knew I was alive. As I cast my mind back to the night before, I winced in painful memory of how badly I had blown it with the lovely Eino—after weeks of frustrating anticipation! I had to shout down for Maurice’s assistance, as I was incapacitated. I asked him to draw me a warm bath, help me up and help me downstairs to thaw. I reckon that all the alcohol I had drunk had acted as an anti-freeze—particularly when I saw the two feet of snow that had accumulated during the night at the foot of the still-wide-open window! Nearly two feet of snow had fallen on Cambridge during that night. The city was paralyzed. As it turned out, it had to borrow emergency snowplows from the city of Stevenage, 25 miles south, to clear the main roads in and out of Cambridge.

After I had recovered sufficiently to be ambulatory, I decided to take my scooter into town. Fat luck! I then discovered what Eino had done in her fit of pique. I had to remove one tire and carry it down about 500 yards to the nearest petrol station for a refill, put on the spare tire as well, then go refill the second tire. Also, it was near-lethal trying to navigate that scooter down the Castle Hill: it was sliding all over the place. That was one winter I shall never forget!