Winter in Vermont

You wake up under a strange ceiling and pad over to a strange window and look out on a sun just chasing the night away and suddenly lighting up a landscape that blinds your eyes – the valleys bone-white and the forests on the mountains like stockades of thistledown, every branch of every tree bearing a sword of snow.

The road that curves past this old farmhouse and up into the mountains gleams with ice and a car comes scudding by and, if you were brought up in what they call a temperate climate, you may wonder for a moment how any car could hold a foot of the road but in this part of the world, work and life have to go on in a planet of snow and you couldn't drive anywhere if you didn't have snow tyres and four-wheel drive. You go off to the bathroom and take a peak at the two-way thermometer in the window. The left column is the indoor temperature, on the right the outdoor. The left says 70 degrees precisely and that's what the thermostat says, set for every room in the house.

The outdoor temperature is ridiculous. Below freezing,the column turns blue. Below zero, it turns red. Well, something must be wrong. You turn on the radio and hear the man giving the ski conditions and then the weather forecast. He says 28 inches base, six inches of fresh powder, the lifts, however, are holding. That's something you've never heard before, lifts holding. My son-in-law tells me that that means no downhill skiing – a very rare prohibition I gather. Why? Well, the man goes on, Happy New Year people, the temperature stands now at 34 degrees below zero. And that's considerably warmer than it was during the night. But cross-country skiers should be warned that the wind-chill factor is such that it feels like 81 degrees below zero.

This is so preposterous that it's impossible to take in until you go out later in the brilliant, midday light. We go out in turns, my son-in-law having warmed up the car. Ready, at 'em, go! Zeb, go! Next, their mother with a ten-week-old baby, a fat, faceless bundle of clothes, then grandma and then the old man. We're off to call on a neighbour.

You'll have deduced that we are in northern New England, in Vermont, and one of the striking things about life here during the Christmas holidays is that people shop and visit and work and hardly mention the weather any more than people in the Caribbean mention the temperature of the sea they swim in. This time, though, we did shake hands with this neighbouring family and an old man said, 'Little nippy out there!'. A young relation visiting from Alaska says, 'It's almost a relief to me. Where I come from, it's been 60 below zero every day for the last three weeks.'

The old man – and if I call him an old man, he is an old man – he reminisces, he's a Vermonter and he recalls the most biting cold he ever experienced. 'Once,' he says, 'I was in Scotland in July. It was my first and only time there and we were in a little hotel by the sea. Well, it was a holiday, so what do I do but go in swimming. Holy smoke!' he says, 'You ever tried that? I went and bought a thermometer. I couldn't believe it! The water was 55 degrees. 55 degrees! I was out of that water quicker than a dog with fleas. It left a lifelong impression.' he said.

This is my contribution to the theory of relativity. All such words as hot, cold, sweet, sour, dry, wet, have no absolute meaning at all. They depend on what you heard from your parents in the place you were brought up in. Apart from wondering how they, the English of all people, ever did colonise and settle northern New England, a famous American geographer once said that if America had been discovered at California and the colonisers had then moved east, New England, with its glacial soil and Arctic winters, never would have been settled. But living up here for some days, you don't wonder that there's little talk about Mr Reagan's cabinet appointments or even the hostages or who's going to be or may be has just been appointed secretary of the interior. Survival is all. But missiles and laser beams are another matter.

The first morning I came down to the kitchen, I found on the ice-box – the refrigerator – door, two notes, one practically a thesis, written by my grandsons. The eight-year-old has printed his thesis out with painstaking precision. It says, 'The cosmos is ever expanding. Even as a tree grows, as a rocket is zooming through deep space, as a satellite is launched, there are more wonders in space, like, will we send men to Saturn? We'll send people to stars or other universes. The vast cosmos has more stars than there are single grains of sand on earth. Isn't that unbelievable?' He's obviously hooked on Carl Sagan.

The other note is from the five-year-old and has been there since Christmas morning. It says, 'Mother, I am thankful for my X-wing fighter, my brown suit, my Millennium Falcon and Eliza.' Eliza is the new baby.

Both the boys are obviously hipped on Star Wars and in all the reams of political stuff that comes on the evening television news, there's only one sort of item that makes them perk up – anything about the MX missile or the proposed deployment of a new intercontinental whatnot. I set this down as a fact without comment, except to say that I once was close to a scientist, a very good scientist and a sweet, serious-minded man and a devoted father. He forbade his sons ever to play with toy pistols or soldiers. One boy was frightened for life, the other went into the marines.

I suppose every generation of young parents proceeds on a theory of bringing up children. I have, in my time, watched the waxing and waning of many fashions. May I whisper to grandparents that it's important never to use that word in relation to the serious business of how to bring up a child. Every first-time mother is grateful for the fact that, after centuries of trial and error, her generation has arrived, finally, at universal truth.

I go back to the Dark Ages when babies were slapped for wetting their pants and then to the time when mothers stayed in the hospital with their newborn for about 10 days, then to the pendulum swing when mothers were told to sit up and dangle their legs the first day and get out the third day at the latest. I'm ashamed but secretly relieved to say that, in my time, the fathers stayed home and brooded, whereas it's now compulsory for the expectant father to attend fatherhood classes for several weeks beforehand and assist in person at the birth.

My children's baby doctor was an enormously tall, gangling, bony man with an amiable, loose-limbed manner, who regarded nothing that happened to babies as odd. He seemed, to us anyway, to sweep away with his affable presence dense fogs of Victorian superstition and old wives' tales. His physical presence did, however, terrify my daughter for a time but we were as dogmatic as all young parents and thought he was one in a hundred. His name was Ben Spock and I understand he went on to make a name for himself.

Well, I don't know how far we've come from old Ben but my daughter is up on every new movement in diet, environmentalism, baby care and the rest and I must say I was astonished, when the baby cried, to see at hand an object which I'd thought had been banished since about 1920. It was what we, in England, called a dummy and what Americans called a pacifier. The wheel, one of the wheels anyway, has come full circle. Thirty years ago it was thought to be the most witless, primitive and ruinous device ever given to a baby. It was said to pull the upper teeth out and it may well have been the reason why some of my college friends, otherwise fairly handsome, came to resemble Bugs Bunny.

Well, Eliza has a dummy but it is an orthodontic pacifier approved by dentists. It's not just a blob of rubber, looks more like the snout of a dolphin curving up to stay under the upper gum without requiring too much outward pull to keep it in. I hope they're right about this one.

You'll gather from these intensely domestic concerns that Washington, which is only 600 miles south of here, seems as remote as Peking. I feel like Captain Scott at the Pole, except that if Captain Scott had had central heating as well as a Swedish stove and snow tyres and an electric typewriter and a word computer, not to mention lashings of shrimp, paté, chicken, geese, cakes and a huge plum pudding – because of grandpa's English origins this un-American item is considerately included in the Christmas fare – Captain Scott would have retired to the House of Lords and died in bed.

Well, since we don't choose to drive into the village in, now, 31 below zero to pick up the New York Times, we must fall back on the local paper which is delivered to the door, come 30 below or 90 above. It is a journal not to be sneezed at. Apart from the usual international and Washington stories and the numbing pictures of the hostages, there's a local item that makes a four-column headline.

A federal court has struck down a law which banned highway billboards in the neighbouring state of Maine. This disturbs Vermont whose extraordinary beauty has gone unsullied since 1968 when it passed a law banning every form of outdoor advertising throughout the state. The court's ground is that outdoor advertising is a form of freedom of speech, guaranteed by the Constitution. We can only hope that if it goes to the Supreme Court the nine old men will decide that the screaming defilement of the highways and byways and valleys and mountains is not a form of free speech the Founding Fathers were eager to preserve.

The art students of the local high school have put on, on exhibition, a life-size group of Jimmy Who?, Donald Duck, Richard Nixon, Abe Lincoln and Mick Jagger playing a silent hand of stud poker and the local Church of the Nativity has still on display a crèche to remind us of what Christmas is meant to be about. And, if this is a rather humdrum thing, we see on the telly that in Bethlehem there were soldiers, in full battledress, on duty at the site of Jesus's birth to keep an eye on the crowds flocking round Manger Square, which is now a parking lot.

Well, as the taxi drivers say, 'You can't stop progress, can you?'

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.

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