White Christmas in Vermont

This is a sort of delayed Christmas card, partly because I've been away from it all. I mean, out of touch with the world of great events and so, ignorant. Happy, but ignorant. I've been about 300 miles north of New York City amid the snows of Vermont, which brings me not to a digression but to an introductory thought.

I never cease to marvel, in a grumbling world, at the way people, who are separated by totally different climates, surroundings, indeed by whole hemispheres, take for granted that their own landscape and their own weather are normal. I was going to add, not to mention the assumption that what they eat routinely every day, what might be called 'maintenance' food, is normal, too. But then I thought of a food crisis in the Middle East that we never heard much about and I think we'd better not go into that beyond telling you briefly about this comic opera battle. 

Several years ago, after one of the wars between Israel and Egypt, a United Nations' force was mustered to keep the peace by patrolling the disputed border. Among the nations who volunteered to send troops there was a contingent from Ireland and one from Tunis. These two were billeted, or grouped, together and they were issued their UN uniforms and whatever was thought, at the time, to be an acceptable common diet. 

Pretty soon the word got to the Secretary-General in New York that both the Irishmen and the Tunisians were on the verge of mutiny. Something quick and desperate had to be done to prevent the United Nations' force from becoming a disunited rabble. The Irish were outraged to discover that their rations included no potatoes and the Tunisians were given none of their beloved couscous. Supplies of both these vital necessities were despatched to the Holy Land and the unholy row was over. 

Well, as for most people thinking that Sheffield or Calcutta or Alaska or New York is normal – if they didn't, of course, they'd go mad or, whenever they could scrape up passage money they'd be off and away having been conned by the advertising copywriters into the belief that the only 'normal' life is wiggling your toes in sands like sugar bedside a swimming pool under semi-tropical trees. This would produce such a monstrous population explosion in places like Miami, Sardinia, Barbados that there would be a stampede from Lower Manhattan and the backstreets of Wigan. 

Even as it is, the ad men have done their work so cunningly that the really... the really huge increase of population in this country – I don't mean of babies but of grown and otherwise sensible people, maybe I should say 'movement' of population – is in what is now called 'the sun belt', that's to say the 3,000-mile belt that starts down around 29 degrees north latitude and sweeps across the Florida peninsula, skipping Louisiana, which is a little dank and swampy to lie around in, and Texas, which tends to be an inland furnace most of the year, into Arizona, Nevada and southern California. 

It used to be said that Florida, on the eastern side of the continent, and southern California, on the western, were populated mainly by retired mid-western farmers who had finally had enough of Arctic winters and burning summers on the prairie and who, instead of ploughing the sod and tossing corn and hay, decided to coddle their arthritis by tossing horseshoes on green lawns under the shade of Australian pines and hamburger joints. But nowadays there are more young than old in these parts and the big trek is of young couples and their kids from the north who really yearn for a barbecue life in the mechanical, all-year-round sunshine. 

I have never been in Florida at Christmas time but I have been in Hollywood and to anyone brought up in a place which can at least expect the possibility of a white Christmas, Hollywood is a sad, almost stagey terrain where you have to try and forget the blazing sun and the eucalyptus trees and the surrounding population of young and old in terrycloth slacks and gaudy sports shirts. 

Come to think of it, southern California and Florida are a good deal closer to the landscape in which Jesus Christ was born, but I'm afraid that Dickens and Prince Albert had much more to do with our picture of Christmas than the New Testament, so that in Hollywood and Miami, you walk from an outdoors of 80 degrees into the wet blanket of an air-conditioned department store where the disco is thundering out the ordeal of 'Old King Wenceslas' through the 'deep and crisp and even'. 

Well, my wife and I, on Christmas Eve in the morning, took off from a mild and snowless Manhattan. Manhattan's very deceptive in winter. Unless there's been a big fall which blankets its way across to the Hudson River, Manhattan can give you the impression that snow is something they have in the Midwest. But within minutes of our plane being airborne, in fact as soon as we crossed Long Island Sound and were headed over Connecticut, the lakes were frozen and the white stuff began to smear the ground. And, an hour later, no more, we landed on the north-west border of Vermont and for most of the journey the land had been white and brown where the barren trees looked like nothing so much as forests of telegraph poles. 

Forty minutes after we landed in a piping 22 degrees with breath issuing from the mouths of my grandsons like steam from a shunting engine, we were through the snow-covered mountains and up a mountain road and inside the double-doored old house, which is an early nineteenth-century farmhouse. And the stoves were humming. The first thing to do while there was some daylight was to bring in the water. 

I don't want you to get the idea that this is a primitive shack and most certainly not that my daughter and her family belong to that dim tribe of aesthetes who think that electricity and a warm bathroom are signs of decadence and that candles and an outdoor well are more cultural. Not at all! In this warm and comfortable house, there is electricity, a dishwasher, clothes washer, a stereo deck, as we now dignify the gramophone, not to mention a Japanese shortwave receiver, which picks up at the flick of a dial the news in English from Moscow, Havana, Ecuador, Melbourne. 

In fact, it is possible, in a morbid moment, to listen to myself what I'm telling you. The TV, by the way, was on the blink, but for the time being there was no water. There had been a severe drought during the fall and then the ground and the well shaft froze with a bang and oceans of snow simply sealed it. So we took buckets, pails, pans, went out and scooped up lashings of snow and brought it in and put it on the splendid Swedish woodburning stove to melt, similarly piled the bathtub. It takes several hours and you don't get anything like the volume you expect but we had it and pretty soon we had all the fixings, the fixings including what my daughter had done to fix a pig she'd slaughtered a month or two before. 

In mid afternoon, right on time with the forecast, it started to snow again. It came on through the evening and the night, and all through Christmas Day and night, and Boxing Day and night, and ended at about noon on the 27th. And by then we'd had 35 inches of new snow. Can I convey what that means? I doubt it. 

The London Meteorological Office tells me that in the past eight-year span there has been scarcely any measurable snow except now, of course, when a few inches seem to paralyse the trains and the airports. Well, the Vermont radio stations were agog with the fine news that 35 inches had been added to a base of 28 inches powder. It's fine news for them because this part of Vermont depends, in the winter, on a brisk invasion of skiers. The main point of telling you all this is that nobody up there, apart from the ski stations, made anything at all of this. Neighbours came stamping in and remarked how unseasonably warm it was. It was then 19 above zero. But, said the forecast, it will be cooler (cooler!) tonight, down around zero. 

To the mere visitor, a 35-inch snow fall only reminds you why Vermont has the second highest income tax of any state. I mean state income tax. They pay, of course, the national income tax, as we all do. And that's because the snow no sooner starts to come flaking down than the snowploughs are out along the thousands of miles of highways and roads. There are four authorities involved: the federal government ploughs the federal, divided highways, which they kept as smooth as any sidewalk, the Vermont state ploughs its own, the county and the township ploughs rumbling up and down all the little side roads. All this costs millions of dollars annually and nobody remarks on this essential chore, essential if the state's population which is under half a million is to survive. And that, in winter, is the main occupation of Vermonters. Survival. 

Well, we survived and prospered. By nightfall, the pots were sizzling, the goose was a-basting. We go for goose, finding turkey difficult to keep succulent, tending after the first few slabs to taste like layers of dried plastic. But smoked turkey! That's another story and we had it in delicious, thin slices as a starter. And meanwhile, the plum pudding was boiling away and the brandy was being whipped into the cream and the eggs for the sauce, and by midnight we were sated with all the fixings and listening to a Quebec radio station, dreaming of a 'Noël blanc'. 

Very late, I tuned in the English news from Moscow and, what was this? The United States and communist China had turned into buddies! And the big chief, Mr Deng, was said to be toasting the American liaison officer. But wasn't Mr Deng one of the hated victims of Mao Tse-tung? Was he not purged in a country where purging can mean exiles and beatings and torture? Maybe it's another Deng? Or perhaps the whole thing was a Russian Christmas joke! 

I doubt that old Solzhenitsyn thinks so. He lives about 20 miles from here and what with the deep snow and the pots of it on the stove, and the news from Peking, he must feel very much at home, quite back to normal.

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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