Severe winter weather

One of the pleasures of these talks and, I hasten to say, from my end of the microphone, is the knowledge that I am free to stay with the assignment that was given me all those years ago when the war was just over and we could finally stop talking about offensives and jungle warfare, and rationing and the rest of it – the assignment to talk on anything that came to mind about America and her people and the way they lived.

It was an enormous relief, after six years of the politics of warfare to talk about the history of ice cream, or why maple leaves go scarlet, or what happened to a baby that was missing one winter night from a New York hospital. 

From 30 years' mail, I've learned a curious truism that is distressing only to studious types who want a radio talk to be a thesis – that people remember most vividly what happened to people. And it's not, I've discovered, only farmers who like to hear about the strange and ingenious uses of soy bean, say. It's not only tobacconists that are interested in how a man in South Carolina still makes a million dollars a year on pounding dates into tobacco and selling it as snuff. And it's not only commercial travellers who smack their lips over the misfortunes of other commercial travellers. 

I well remember, years ago now, sitting in a lounge at Kennedy Airport in New York and being approached by a formidable Englishman in late middle age. He simply wanted to say something nice about the talks and quickly said there was one he would never forget. He'd introduced himself and I recognised the-then Lord Chief Justice and I riffled on the instant through my mind and thought, 'Now let's see, what could it be? Some forgotten piece about the Supreme Court? The trials of Alger Hiss? An appreciation of Chief Justice Earl Warren?' 

No! It was about a businessman who flew from Chicago to New York for a meeting and got snowbound in the airport motel overnight. I could barely recall it but he tickled my memory and, for inquisitive people, may I say that the man never got into New York City from the airport. He abandoned his meeting and, once the runways were cleared, flew back to Chicago. So he intended, but approaching Chicago they ran into a storm system so wide that the plane had to go on and on and land 2,000 miles to the west, in Los Angeles. 

The passengers were then told to hang around the airport for a few hours till the mid-west's storm had moved on. Eventually his plane was called. He put in a quick telephone call to his wife in Chicago and though I guess she was first alarmed at his being in Los Angeles, she was heart-breakingly sympathetic with his plight and told him to hurry on home. He boarded the plane for the trip back to Chicago but, this time, there was a storm coming in from the north-east which had closed in all the airports from Chicago to the Atlantic coast. So, his homebound plane flew on and on and landed a thousand miles east of Chicago, in clear skies back at Kennedy. 

Now, so far as I can remember there was no more point to the story but what had stayed in the Lord Chief Justice's mind was the very short and snappy dialogue that took place between the husband and wife when he phoned her again and told her he was now back in New York. She was unamused and unbelieving. And to this day, I imagine, whenever the poor fellow says, 'Honestly, honey!' I can hear her snapping back, 'Don't give me that "honestly"!' 

Well, although this freedom is very enjoyable to me – to take up something that's far removed from what newspapermen call hard news – there are times when you would have to be blind and deaf to ignore something that overwhelms the life of a nation. An earthquake terrifies Los Angeles. The commanding general of all the United Nations' forces in Korea is fired. The president is murdered, another resigns in disgrace. And this is such a time. 

It may be possible in your country, wherever you are, three thousand, eight thousand miles away, to take an interest in the early adventures of the new team in the White House, but to everybody over here, with the possible exception of Californians and the inhabitants of the Florida Keys, there is only one possible topic which amounts, over a vast stretch of the country, to an obsession. And that's understandable enough since, in some places, it is neither more nor less than an obsession to survive. I mean, of course, the onslaught of the most severe winter since 1888. 

My first bad winter in America, '33, '34, I remember running into old gaffers who kept saying, 'Huh! If you think this is something, you should have been in the winter of '88!' Come to think of it, you didn't have to be ancient to have endured that. It was after all only 45 years away, but '88 was so much of a legend that it was a regular joke in the vaudeville and burlesque theatres. But from now on the legend of '88 will be buried under the memory of '77. It's difficult to begin to convey the severity, the feel of it to anybody like a beloved London friend of mine who comes stamping indoors out of a temperature of 39 degrees Fahrenheit saying, 'My God, it's bitter!' Thirty-nine is tropical to 70 per cent of the American population these days. 

And here again we have a special difficulty which is the fact that you have either always used Centigrade – what we call Celsius in the United States – or are moving over to it, but the movement has been tentative enough in Britain to leave most people quite unaware of what Centigrade feels like. In America, they use Fahrenheit everywhere and the word 'below' means 'below zero'. I shall use Fahrenheit from now on and ask you to imagine what it's like to wake up in a big city, Chicago or Cleveland, and find it's 20 below zero outside or 52 degrees of frost. It happened last week and wherever the snow ploughs had been able to cope and the drifts had not built up over the roadways, police cars hobbled along with their loudspeakers warning everybody to get indoors and stay indoors. In hundreds of cities and towns across an Arctic stretch of America, say, 1500 miles wide and 800 miles long, there was no need to urge people to stay indoors. 

There's a new phrase, a new menace abroad in America this winter. It's an old phrase to Polar explorers and the air force patrols who maintain their watch in igloos on godforsaken islands around the tip of our globe, but because of a radical and puzzling shift in the prevailing winter winds across America, the phrase has come into use with us and we don't need to ask what it means. It's 'wind chill factor' and what it means, quite simply and frightfully, is that if the temperature is only one below zero, as it was in New York City last week, but there's a 45 mile an hour wind, the effect on the human body is that of about 40 below zero. Walking one block of this was enough for me. 

But to try and give you an idea, a comparative idea, I have it from the London Meteorological Office that, in the past eight years, there has not been measurable snow in London. Now going outside and noticing that snow comes up to the rim of your shoe sole does not mean, technically, half an inch of snow. 

Let me put it another way. Many of you may remember, with a shudder, the bad, bitter English winter of 1962/3. London that winter had between three and four inches of snow. In the southern counties in general, a foot. Well, Watertown, in upstate New York, has had 71 inches of snow in six days this week. And Buffalo, also in New York, usually has about 40, 50 inches of snow in a normal winter. In the past four weeks, they've had 124 inches. Now these are figures that on paper boggle the mind but, as white stuff on the ground, they literally overwhelm the geography of any town and threaten to suffocate its life. The winds whip ten foot snowdrifts into little mountains 20 feet high and inside them, invisible, are motorcars and many people frozen in them. Across half the country, the pictures have had a gloomy monotony, snow up to the tops of shop windows, the great interstate eight-lane highways obliterated. And this, remember, is in a country that's used to heavy snows, with lots of mammoth equipment that can comfortably keep the railroad tracks clean and the highways free enough. 

This year nature is too much for all of them. And too much for the Great Lakes, the lakes 200 miles long, 50 miles wide, frozen solid, with the freighters and barges locked in and helicopters flying out to drop food to the crews. And the natural gas that provides one-third of the nation's heating is not enough for the paralysed north-east and Midwest, so hundreds of factories are closed, between two and three million more unemployed, millions of schoolchildren at home – not a one at school in Pennsylvania, which is a region almost the size of England – and the winter outlook is for no change in the strange new trajectory of the winds which normally blow from the west, more or less, east. But, for some reason the meteorologists cannot fathom, the winds have come in from the Pacific, swerved up north, gone right up into the Arctic Sea and then looped and come tearing down north to south, so that this year they have carried the zero experience down even into the American Deep South. The Florida vegetable crop is already totally ruined. 

And there's another consequence of this shift in the prevailing wind which the north-east and the Midwest have been too preoccupied to care about. The usual straight west-to-east wind hits the cold air over the High Sierra and the Rockies and deposits masses of snow. But this year the winds, swerving way north, have deprived the far western states of their normal run-off from the continental watershed. Add to this the fact that California has had an 18-month drought and you have another vast region of the country begging for snow and itching for rain, with its crops and its cattle withering in the brown stubble down about a thousand miles. 

Courage, friends. And pray for those in peril on the American land.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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