His Coldest Winter

The winter of 1962/63 was the coldest since 1740. From Boxing Day 1962 until March 1963, snow covered the whole of Britain. The sea froze. The Thames froze so hard that people drove cars across it. It was a winter of bizarre and wonderful detail: a poet was found frozen to death in Windsor, a car towed skiers across Ruislip Lido, a man resorted to digging up his carrots with a pneumatic drill, and a duck found frozen solid in a clay wagon was thawed out and brought back to life. Within this unreal, altered landscape the lives of sixteen-year-old Alan Rae and twenty-six-year-old Geoffrey Fairhurst collide.