Chapter Twenty
OMG! Is it snowing with you, Layla? Check out the photo of the garden from ten minutes ago – it’s still coming down quite heavily – and settling!
If you look closely, you can see Margaret’s tiny pawprints in a perfect circle as she left the house and immediately thought better of it! Miss you. Mum xx
On the one hand, this unexpected wintery spell is perfect timing because I’m not due in work today.
On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do if the snow continues and the boys’ school shuts.
I never had this problem when Layla was little.
If we had a snow day it was always a treat because I didn’t have to be anywhere else.
The only issue was whether Joe would be able to get into the office and to be honest, if the trains were running it was fine, and if they weren’t then his boss and colleagues understood because they were in the same boat.
The difference with the library is that there needs to be someone there to open it – and it definitely needs to be open.
I know it’s not exactly a matter of life and death whether someone can return their books or not, but it’s more about the shelter and sanctuary a public building like a library provides.
Because of this, one of my first reactions on seeing the snow this morning was, how are they going to manage at work?
Closely followed by, does Layla have snow?
Will her room be warm enough? What if she was out last night and didn’t get back before it started snowing and she slipped on the ice and is currently freezing to death on a pavement somewhere?
(This question was easily answered by the tracker app, which told me she’d been in her room since seven the previous evening.)
The next barrage of questions were: how do I check whether the boys’ school is closed?
Can I face driving the boys to school even if it’s technically still open?
Would my sister-in-law hate me in perpetuity if I failed in facilitating their access to a very expensive education for one single day?
Do we have enough food in the house for four people?
Will the supermarket still deliver if the blizzard continues?
Does this constitute a blizzard or is it just a light dusting of snow?
Am I being melodramatic? Doesn’t it look pretty where the flakes are settling on the bare branches of that rose bush?
The boys were, as you’d imagine, beside themselves with excitement.
They’ve both been skiing in the past and have seen plenty of alpine weather on the slopes but there’s something about a UK snow day that is delightfully unexpected, whilst also feeling somehow right and proper, especially in the run-up to Christmas.
We’d all had a relative lie-in this morning anyway.
Because Tuesday was one of my days off, I had advised Miss Squirrel that we wouldn’t need the school breakfast club and my plan had been to drive them in for nine o’clock instead of the frankly antisocial eight.
But as soon as I saw the weather outside, I made an executive decision to cancel school altogether, emailing Miss Squirrel and apologising for being ‘completely snowed in’ (which was a little snow-white lie given that Joe had been able to drive to the station earlier).
I then called the boys down from their bedroom where they’d been practising their times tables (yes, really) and drew back the curtain on the glazed kitchen door in a big reveal.
‘It’s snowing!’ I said. ‘And school is shut for the day!’
Hugo’s mouth hung open in astonishment. Lawrence’s eyes were so wide I could see the swirling flakes reflecting in his dark irises.
‘Snow,’ they both whispered reverently and the three of us stood for a moment in that lovely, muffled silence you get when everything outside is covered in a thick blanket of white.
A few hours later, as I was freezing my arse off in our back garden, Lawrence had just presented me with a frozen cat turd that he thought might be a fossil, and we were on our fourth or possibly fifth change of clothes, the snow day was starting to lose some of its sense of magic and fun.
Our house was not equipped with snow gear and when Hugo (not unreasonably given that he clearly assumed we were a skiing family along with all of his other acquaintances) asked very politely where he might be able to find a pair of salopettes and snow gloves, I was at a loss.
I managed to find a couple of pairs of Layla’s old mittens to go over their very smart woollen school gloves but of course these were sodden within moments of Lawrence casting his first snowball, as were the girls’ leggings I’d had to pretend were genuine skiwear thermals and the three layers of socks the boys had on beneath their school shoes.
There was one old pair of Layla’s wellingtons that we briefly rotated between them, but they were five sizes too big for either nephew and had to be abandoned when Lawrence ‘accidentally’ tipped a shovel full of snow into one whilst his brother was wearing it.
The radiators were on maximum heat inside the house, which meant that layering up before going out was like doing star jumps in a sauna whilst wrapped in a fifteen-tog duvet, and within minutes of each foray into the great outdoors there was a speedy return because someone felt too cold or their nose was running or they couldn’t feel their fingers anymore, and a metric tonne of slush was marched through the house.
By mid-morning, every available surface was covered in sodden garments gently steaming and the house was starting to smell like a herd of wet goats.
‘I know our snowman’s not quite finished yet,’ I said, considering the misshapen lump of ice and mud that stood three feet high before us, ‘but we could have a little break for a hot chocolate if you wanted? It would give some of our things a chance to dry out maybe?’
This seemed a satisfactory solution all round, not least because it gave me an excuse to return to the warm kitchen to simmer a saucepan of milk like a 1950s housewife.
I’d sent Layla to university with our only container of instant chocolate but no matter, I had cocoa powder and sugar and it really was more satisfying making it the old-fashioned way, particularly when I found some old chocolate cake sprinkles tucked in the back of a cupboard.
Although they didn’t look quite as I’d anticipated when they were floating around in the mugs – and Lawrence asked why there were ants in his drink.
After the very successful hot chocolate we managed to roll a roughly spherical greying head for our snowman and then, of course, the fun bit was going around the house trying to find accessories for him.
Luckily the contents of the collective Harper wardrobes were already scattered throughout the downstairs rooms, either saturated with snow or dripping slowly onto the carpet so we were spoiled for choice.
He ended up with an England Rugby bobble hat, the mandatory carrot nose, upon which was perched a pair of mirrored sunglasses that Joe had probably last worn in the late Nineties, and a hideous crocheted waistcoat of mine dating back to a similar time.
We tucked a newspaper under one of his stick arms and wedged an old pair of shoes at his base so that by the time we got to the obligatory photo stage he was looking pretty dapper and I managed to set the timer on my phone to take a shot of all four of us (including the snowman) to send to Joe, Layla, Mum and Richard.
I even uploaded it to the library staff group chat and received a flurry of emojis in return, including some from both David and Colin that made no sense whatsoever.
That afternoon I lit the fire in the sitting room, and we watched a Christmas film from the Eighties that was significantly more sexist and awful than I’d previously remembered in my nostalgic haze.
The boys did their music practice and laughed uproariously at my attempts to join in with their conversational Mandarin before we video messaged Layla to show her the snowman while it was still daylight.
I then listened to the boys read their school books and suggested that they both wrote a festive story to give to Maman and Daddy when they came home.
This was obviously excellent aunty behaviour from me but also gave me a chance to make dinner because the afternoon had run away with me somewhat.
Nothing like small children to gobble up the hours albeit in a really slow way.
I recalled in years past that sensation of spending what felt like an eternity playing some mind-numbing game or watching a self-choreographed expressive dance performance (Layla fully embraced this phase) and looking up at the clock to realise that you’d missed breakfast and forgotten to feed the cats but it was still only eight-thirty in the morning and you had the whole of the day still to get through.
Lawrence finished his story (four lines about a boy who visits his aunty’s house and builds a snowman) and added a couple of illustrations before getting bored and wanting to help me make dinner (which slowed down my process somewhat) but Hugo was completely absorbed in his story, writing reams and reams well into the evening and only pausing to speed through his dinner and hop in and out of the bath in record time.
As the days went on he continued to work on it, not letting anyone else read the draft manuscript until he had finished.
I even mentioned it to Miss Squirrel when I dropped them off at breakfast club on Thursday, asking if Hugo could possibly be given time to carry on writing instead of having to join in with the spelling bingo and Kerplunk which were that morning’s scheduled activities.
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ she said, her blonde ponytail bobbing along with the nods. ‘Hugo told me about his story yesterday, didn’t you Hugo?’