Why my happy festive memories are blurred by today’s brutal cold realities, Christa Akroyd

It brought back so many happy memories of being a child in winter, with homemade toboggan at the ready.. it’s blacksmith-made runners polished to a gleam... long before the snow set in, waiting for enough to fall from the skies to join friends sliding down the hills on the fields near to our home in Bradford.

We would come home from playing out frozen to our bones, or as we used to say half starved to death, our home knitted hats, scarves and gloves solid with ice and shivering so much mum used to tell us to shut the door as we were bringing the cold inside.

She would run us a hot bath where our legs turned purple from the contrast in temperature. With no central heating we wrote our names in the frost on the inside of our windows. And in a morning getting ready for school we would leap out of bed and rush down to the open fire where mum had our uniforms warming on the huge mesh fireguard for us to get dressed in.

We ate porridge or Readybrek for breakfast and wore two pairs of socks inside our footwear.

We couldn’t wait to build a snowman or slip and slide to school in our duffle coats, wellies and balaclavas, which were once again left by the huge industrial pipes that warmed our school cloakrooms so they would be at least half dry by the time it was home time.

Snow and ice brought with it fun and games. Strange how you never felt the cold as a youngster. Fascinating how snow made everything in industrial smoggy Bradford look clean and pristine. Funny how childhood memories brought snow every single year looking back. And it was always a good time to be enjoyed. But it also brought jobs to be done.

Dad would begin by saving the ashes from the coal fire to sprinkle on the paths. My mum would start putting out scraps of food and bacon rind for the birds with her little Observer book at the ready to identify the hungry visitors (I still have it).

The whole neighbourhood joined together to clear steps, pavements and pathways, to ensure the elderly could at least walk safely to the shops. If they couldn’t we went for them.

I can still see my gran’s spidery handwriting on the note she gave us wrapped up in two pounds and a list for the local butcher, who would serve her half a pound of mince, a pound of sausages and two pork chops wrapped firstly in grease proof then in brown paper with the calculations added in up in pencil on one corner.

We would be given a few pennies for our trouble, but then it wasn’t a trouble, it was what family and neighbours did back then.

I told Elise on her eleventh birthday last week that it was forecast to be a white Christmas here again this year and she was crestfallen that she wouldn’t be here.

For an Aussie she behaves much more like a Brit. She loves the cold and the rain and hates the sun. More importantly she loves the excitement snow brings when you are a child.

But this year the sudden cold snap will have very different connotations for many. It’s arrival will be greeted with dread by those who fear it will bring with it nothing but misery.

Of course while there are many who are genuinely excited that snow is forecast for Christmas Day and we are, for the first time in a long time, looking towards a White Christmas, for millions, terrified as to how they will keep warm with astronomical heating bills in the offing, it is truly a worrying time.

And so this week I ask the Government to do all it can to allay fears that come April when the energy cap is lifted the one third of households that are estimated will be in fuel poverty by then can at least plan to enjoy Christmas without worrying how they will manage in the months that follow. Or worse still decide to turn the heating off like some Dickensian household because for many, particularly the elderly, that is exactly what they will do unless the government makes their intentions clear right now.

I am also thinking of Ukraine.

Once dominating the news agenda now all too often forgotten. When I visited just a few days after the war began in early March this year it was freezing cold. So cold my contact lenses froze in my eyes. Thousands upon thousand of refugees were pouring into Lviv and queuing in ice cold temperatures to leave the country.

Some of them came here to Yorkshire and almost all of them told me they believed they would be back home by Christmas, that the war would be won and over. It isn’t, and it probably won’t be for a long time.

But if we thought that conditions were horrific then in spring as Russia began it’s illegal operation spare a thought for Ukraine now.

Huge tracts of this enormous country are facing the coldest of winters without heating and water, their once sophisticated infrastructure destroyed deliberately by a monster who wants to take what isn’t his to take.

Thirteen thousand (and probably more) Ukrainians have lost their lives fighting for the right to remain free as the impressive President and his first lady continue their quest to seek help from foreign countries just to have the weapons to continue that fight.

Putin is literally starving them out, just as Stalin did during the Holodomor of the 1930s when millions died in a manmade famine designed to dampen Ukraine’s desire for independence.

He must not be allowed to succeed and while hostilities appear to be put on hold while the Russian army regroups, we must not forget that there too, in the freezing cold, are people desperately trying to stay alive in appalling conditions.

As the snow falls here and there, my thoughts are with all those who do not know where to turn just to survive.

It may look pretty on the Christmas cards, but it is a long way from those happy childhood carefree days we remember so fondly.

Being cold is more than just miserable. For many it is deadly.