A Planet of Snow

Until I was nearing 40 I never hesitated when I faced an official form - a passport, income tax - to write down my occupation as "freelance journalist".

After a time I found that some officious official - airline counter man, an auditor - would want to have a linguistic or legal debate over the word "freelance".

"But doesn't that ever entail a written contract?" or "Could you not equally be defined as part-time staff?" and so on and so forth.

So I dropped ever boasting about my freedom and settled for "reporter".

I also, in my 40th year, made what to many ageing journalists is a familiar and painful discovery - that once you have a wife and child the best way to freelance is out of a job.

I was about to start looking for one but by luck or the grace of the Lord one was offered to me by a very small compact little Lancashire man, with a square face, silky spiky hair, a grey Chaplin moustache and behind glasses as thick as goggles, a pair of twinkling eyes.

Twinkling, I hasten to say, with scepticism. He ought to have been born in Missouri, whose state motto, based on a disbelief in human beings, is "Show Me".

His name was Alfred P Wadsworth and he was the editor of the then Manchester Guardian which was known throughout Europe as the best of all liberal papers.

AP Wadsworth was just about the best editor a man, a foreign correspondent, could pray for.

"You're on your own in America," he said to me. "Don't wait for assignments, make them your own.

"I want you to report America, not just Washington. And pay no attention to the paper's editorial line."

Well there are many wonderful stories to tell about old AP but I was about to tell you of the weird feeling I had on becoming a staff member of anything and my first piece.

Before I went to bed on the night of 26 December 1947 I looked out of my bedroom on a steady snowfall and the stuff piling slowly and evenly along the windowsill.

Beautiful, very Christmassy, very early too - usually no snow in December.

I woke up next morning and looked out not on New York city but on a planet of snow.

A brisk wind, 40 miles an hour in fact, had come up during the night and blown great drifts against buildings, turned motorcars into polar bears and the only 5th Avenue bus I saw, which was an imported London double decker, was buried up to its neck.

There were no newspapers, you had to pick up figures and facts from the radio - there was no television either - and go out mushy or creaking through the deep and crisp and even, through a strange, indeed a unique experience: wholly white and wholly silent New York city.

The relevant figure was 26.4 inches of snow.

That was the first piece I wrote as a staff member of a newspaper or of any other body.

The now-historic Boxing Day 1947 was naturally my first thought when I woke up last Tuesday morning and looked out and saw the windowsill - a smooth white mountain.

The reservoir invisible as such, just a blinding stretch of the plain of snow which is Central Park.

Very beautiful and quiet, though the cars were sliding smoothly through a thin black snake of the transverse road which was already cleared.

Fifth Avenue was a canyon between adjoining piled up mountains.

The city had got going early on the Monday, 1600 snowploughs churning and swooshing through the main highways while the mayor begged people that lived in the suburbs or on city side streets to exercise most of all patience, patience - we'll get you tomorrow or the next day.

Meanwhile, he begged, don't anybody drive into the city. There's no place to park until thousands of completely buried automobiles have been exhumed.

I don't know how long it took 55 years ago to get everything back to normal, I should think at least a week.

This time though the city has done wonders in a few days. Of course those snowploughs make a good beginning and while I don't know what a Russian snowplough looks like I ought to say that American city snowploughs, compared with what I've seen in the temperate cities of Europe, are as juggernauts to a sports car.

And this year there's something quite new. What, a rollicking youngster is said to have asked, what is that? What is that that is loud hungry and orange?

The answer is the new snow melting machine.

Up to now the snow-laden cities of the North East - New York especially - have been the victims of a true dilemma, which you may recall from your very early grammar lessons - a dilemma is a choice of two courses of action, neither of which is satisfactory.

Well in this city the snow has always been majestically swept aside by the juggernauts, white soon to be grey mountains enclosing the roadway.

And then the fairly solid, crumply snow was hauled off to one or other of the two rivers and dumped.

It was a procedure that took time and left many mountains that with warmer temperatures melted into torrents of water that flooded the subways.

After every snowstorm the mayor was the first to hear loud complaints about the pollution of the rivers by the huge deposits of detritus and salt from the city streets.

The choice was between river pollution or city floods. A problem never solved - we just suffered a little or a lot of each affliction.

But now there's this new, huge, diesel-powered machine pulled along by a tractor trailer cab.

It has a heated cylinder that liquefies the snow as it's dumped into a bin.

A rotator pump churns the water of the melting snow and pours it on the still solid masses which of course dissolve in turn and the whole vast bowl of hot soup is vomited through a filter into the sewage system.

The action is continuous and disgorges 60 tons of melted snow an hour.

The beauty part is that it directs the flow into the sewage system and not into the streets to go roaring down the subways as of old. What will they think of next?

What the mayor would like them to think of is how to pay for this recent storm, which on this city dumped 19 inches.

In the suburbs and down in New Jersey, two feet or more.

Two hundred miles to the north and east the city of Boston, whose plight we will not go into, had an all-time record 27-28 inches.

I have an attachment to that old city having spent a year at Harvard on the banks of the Charles River across from the city. But I'm sure they're able to cope this time.

During my year there was in March the worst blizzard they'd had in memory. All the streets looked like the miles-long chain of trenches of the First World War and the mountains of snow piled up against the sidewalks and stayed there, turning from white to grey to sooty black.

Because the weather stayed freezing nothing seemed to melt.

But where were the sanitation crews? - never in America called dustmen.

They were on strike.

And what was the mayor of Boston doing about it? The mayor was in jail, serving out a sentence for some offence or other.

Nevertheless he was a man of courage and infinite ingenuity and - it took time - he managed to go on running the city, to rouse the workers or stand-ins and get busy and in two weeks or more the streets and sidewalks were just reduced to stretches of slippery mud and gurgling sewers.

This time 2003 there was no strike and the mayor is positively not in jail.

But now Mayor Bloomberg's problems, of which in a sinking economy the city is worse off than the national city average, he first has to find some money to pay for this successful snow removal.

We've had in the past five years such a run of mild winters - we being New York city - last year an unbelievable two-point-something inches of snow.

So far, before last Monday, we'd had 15 inches and the mayor had left in his snow budget for ploughs, melters, staff, salt, $3.2m.

But the city finance men figure a snowstorm costs a million dollars an inch. From somewhere another 20 millions has to be found.

As bad luck would have it last Monday was a national holiday, which was good in that so few people had to go to work or school, terrible that the stores and shops did a miserable business.

By the end of the week the mayor was told that the take, the retail shoppers, spent about a quarter of what they normally do on, what are called, presidential sales.

Last Monday is officially called Presidents (plural) Day - an awkward, fairly recent, arrangement which abolished 12 February, Lincoln's birthday, as a national holiday and also George Washington's birthday on the 22nd.

Halfway in between it was thought it would greatly help business by having just one holiday for both of them.

By the way, an interesting sidelight on national holidays.

There is now only one national holiday on the calendar named after a famous American.

And who would that be? Jefferson, Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt?

No, no president has made it.

The third Monday in January is everywhere dedicated to the memory of the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING 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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