The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  How does a skater know the figures are right? Rob would take a scribe – a large compass – and spin it round to carve a line to practise on – or to check the shape of circles already skated. In competition, scribes are not permitted, nor can skaters rely on painted markings on the ice. They only have instinct. Clean sections of the rink are marked out for each competitor. The judges stand to one side, watching. When the skater has finished, the judges check the alignment of the figure from different angles, examine the tracings of the turns, and pace off the diameters of the circles to check their sizes. Are the circles perfectly round, without wobbles, flats, bulges, or any inward curl? Are all the circles in the figure the same size? Are the turns on a figure lined up with the central axis, and do the circles themselves also all line up? Are the turns symmetrical in shape and executed on true edges without scraping? Are the loops shaped like loops, and not circular or pointed? Then the next skater steps out onto the ice.

  I’m still considering, after my attempt at reading Meyer, how figure skating might be notated. I ask Rob what system he used.

  ‘But it’s not really written down,’ says Rob, surprised by my question. ‘You might have a list of moves in your head . . . ’

  I think of all those routines, lost to posterity. I wonder if tracings are ever recorded before the Zamboni ice maker sweeps round and cuts the rink clean. ‘Did your coach ever film you so you could watch it back to improve, or take photos of your tracings?’

  ‘No,’ Rob says. Nor was anyone watching him practise. ‘You’d do it in isolation. You’d go off and do it on your own. There’s a focus, and a calmness to be found in doing that. I never used to like people talking – parents coming round to speak to their child, or someone passing on information: “Your mum’s going to be late tonight.” A friend saying, “Hey, how’s it going?” would break my concentration.’

  ‘Were you listening to the ice, then?’

  ‘I used to like getting the sound just right. When I pushed off it made a kind of crunching sound: Ssssch. I’d see how quiet I could be . . . When you start off you’re more heavy-handed, and when you’re doing it right, the ice sounds right as well. No one ever said to me, you must get it sounding a certain way – but you’d know, for example, when someone did a jump well. You didn’t hear a big dollop into the ice. They just caught it right. The sound of skating is quite lovely. It’s amazing how people can do these massive jumps and come down quietly.’

  It certainly is. It terrifies me. ‘What’s the best kind of ice?’

  ‘Some rinks get really cold. The ambient temperature in the rink is different to that on the ice. Sometimes I was freezing, and then I didn’t feel as fast – when ice is too cold it tends to be more brittle. There’d be a sweet spot you wanted to get to where there’s almost a sweat on the ice, where it’s clean, and when you push out it’s really smooth. I’d like to think that I wasn’t too much of a diva when it came to the quality of the ice. But I really cared. Because if the ice was done just so, then you could go fast over it, without much resistance. It is dead thin: three or four inches of ice over concrete – so you want it to be really smooth. Fresh ice is beautiful. When you go to a public session, with people going round in circles, it’s like a record with many grooves – you try to get across it, your foot gets caught. You go slower, and you have to work at it, because you’re going over everyone’s ridges. And if you fall – my God, it’s like sandpaper.

  ‘When you do figures, the ice must be absolutely clean and smooth with no markings. The Zamboni goes round and cuts but it also puts water down behind it. After a really heavy session, they’ll have to cut off more than they wanted to and put down more water, and it won’t freeze – so you’re doing figures into wet ice. Horrible. You can’t see where you’re going. Sometimes you can still see marks in the ice beneath you. Or you’ll find the ice hadn’t frozen smoothly so there are little dimples. If you hit one of those, if there’s any roughness on the ice when you’re doing figures or jumps, you’d go off course.’

  Rob’s mention of irregular ice makes me wonder if he’s ever skated outdoors, on natural ice.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I had dreams about it. As a kid I had dreams of being able to skate through the fields to Oxford, the whole world would be covered in ice.’

  ‘Just think,’ I say, ‘you could have skated downriver from Bicester to get to the rink.’ Rob laughs again at that thought, and heads off into the frosty night to warm up his boat.

  Talking to Rob about ice rinks reminds me of swimming pools, the everyday examples of H2O in captivity which contribute in their small, artificial way to the 71 per cent of the world that is water. The open-air swimming pools vanish at the very same time that the outdoor ice rinks appear. In autumn, the strong winter covers are pulled back over the pool’s water in parks and hotels around the world and the water level drained. Meanwhile, commercial rinks appear seasonally in the forecourts of major museums and public parks. I imagine outdoor ice rinks freezing and melting, freezing and melting, as seen from space.

  One midsummer Sunday, Neddy Merrill, the protagonist of a short story by John Cheever, decides to travel the 4 miles home from a house party by swimming through neighbourhood pools. ‘He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.’ He swims, and in between pool lengths he walks through hedges and jogs up garden paths and even crosses a major highway, growing impossibly weary on the way. He swims, and enters a dreamlike state: ‘The water refracted the sound of voices and laughter and seemed to suspend it in mid-air’. A dry pool – ‘a breach in the chain’ – disappoints him. His journey creates a sense of the unreal, the out of time. A storm is brewing. He gets home to find he has aged decades, can barely stand. His home is dark, and empty – his family gone.

  Could a skater travel through space and time like Cheever’s swimmer? I consider the difficulties – there are fewer rinks than pools, for a start. After all, how many people have a private ice rink? But while it’s geographically implausible, it would also change the tone of the story. No – the immersion of the swimmer in water has different implications. Neddy Merrill is nearly naked, wearing nothing but his trunks. The outfit, or lack of it, makes him seem more vulnerable and gives his hubris a comic edge. A long-distance skater would have to be well wrapped up and purposeful, like a Dutch champion racing along the frozen canals and rivers of Friesland in the annual Elfstedentocht (‘Eleven cities tour’), arms swinging as the skates glide forward at high speed. A skater would not be left behind by time.

  IV

  The rink’s surface plays a vital role in curling – a unique sport, in which players affect the speed and direction of the puck not by making contact with it, but by polishing the ice in its path. There is one dedicated outpost of this sport in England – in Tunbridge Wells – but I choose to take the train to Fife. I want to visit Kinross Curling Club, which claims to be the oldest in the world. (It celebrated its 350th anniversary in 2018.) Many of the rules of curling were laid down here in 1838. It’s not the rules of the game I hope to unravel, however, but how the ice is made.

  The end of October finds the season well underway, and it seems there’s barely a gap in the timetable on the rinkside whiteboards. My train pulls out of London before dawn. The city’s Hallowe’en orange glow is soon replaced by darker skies over the home counties. The sun rises over late fields of blue flax as I travel north. By midday, I’m crossing the new Forth Road Bridge into Fife.

  The pink-footed geese are arriving for the winter, flying south over Loch Leven in long skeins, shifting around in V-formations to catch each other’s slipstreams.

  The curling clubhouse is tucked away behind a grand golf hotel on the main street of Kinross. As I walk around the windowless exterior to find an entrance, I hear the soft throb of the refrigeration plant over the wind. Inside, it’s a silver temple to cold – above me the huge crumpled tubes of the dehumidifier hang from heat-r
eflective foil ceiling panels. The rink takes up most of the floor. I’ve made it one hour before the Ladies Super League Championships begin, just in time to see the final preparations. At the far end of the hall I spot a figure dressed in blue, walking up and down methodically, spraying the ice with water.

  Steven Kerr has been in charge of the Kinross rink for over twenty-five years, creating the ice pad and caring for it over the season. The drops of water he is spraying create the ‘pebble’ effect that allows the heavy granite stone to move smoothly over the ice. The iceman’s skill lies in distributing the water evenly, so that one drop lands on every square centimetre of the rink. This is done by carefully regulating his walking pace, and even the swing of his arm. Once the pebble has frozen, Steven has a few more passes to make over the rink before the surface is ready to play on. He shaves the pebble with a guillotine blade or ‘nipper’ which sings like hail on a tin roof as it clips the ice. After taking the tips off the pebble, he walks the rink once again, softly brushing the ice with a sheepskin to remove debris; finally, he places ten curling stones in a wooden frame, and pulls the whole rack over the ice. The principle behind this manoeuvre, also called the ‘first end’, is to break in the ice for the players – a philosophy akin to making, and then throwing away, the first pancake.

  Steven sets the stones out on the ice to acclimatize and shows me the polished area on the base which will make contact with the rink. Tomorrow, Steven tells me, he will pare back the battered pebble to the ice pad, and begin the process again. The movement of stones, sweepers and shoes, ironically the very activity for which the ice needs to be perfect, soon destroys its patina. The iceman is constantly in demand; he must observe the rink’s conditions closely. As we are talking, he checks the temperature gauge, to make sure the surface of the ice is -4.5°C. Any colder, any warmer, and the stone won’t curl.

  I touch the ice briefly. It feels solid as a textured glass window on a winter morning. It’s hard to believe how delicate it is. Any part of the body that touches the ice will raise the temperature. The iceman learns to see activity on the rink as if through infrared thermography: a player who puts out a hand to steady themselves as they slide forward with the stone becomes a glowing field of red and yellow against a cool blue background. Even the number of players using the ice must be taken into consideration. Extraordinary to think that my presence here is a threat. ‘Come and get a cup of tea,’ says Steven, luring me away from the rink.

  I’m curious to know how one becomes an iceman. My state school in the Scottish Borders encouraged skiing and golfing, but not curling. Nor was ice-making among the career choices that were suggested to me (but then neither was writing books). Steven tells me that after school he began to train as an optician. Then a friend invited him to join the rink in Stirling, and he found that ice was more alluring than eyes. Does he play? Well, he used to, he says, but it’s a bit of a busman’s holiday . . .

  The championship ladies are gathering in the bar, which is perched above the main hall in the manner of a church organ. The space is insulated to ensure that none of the dust or heat from our bodies reaches the ice. There’s no sense of claustrophobia, since a window runs the length of the bar, looking down on the rink with its red, white and blue targets or ‘houses’. The ladies sip tea and catch up on the news. There’s little time to waste. Some are already zipping up their gilets, or digging out footwear. They show me the smooth Teflon sole that enables them to slide across the ice, and the single slipper with grips (a ‘gripper’) that is worn over it on just one foot, to control their movement. At the bell they move downstairs onto the ice. ‘After you, Maggie.’ ‘Thank you, Sheila.’

  One woman remains in the bar. Jean has recently retired from the game, and volunteers to tell me what’s going on down below. Her accent thickened by a cold, she explains that the match is divided into eight ‘ends’ in which players aim their stones into the house. ‘The idea is to get a number of stones right in the centre of the house. It’s a bit like bowling,’ Jean continues. ‘But it’s a very strategic game.’

  I remember reading that curling has been compared to chess played on ice.

  Jean points out the four players in each team carefully: ‘The first person to deliver the stone is called the Lead, then the Second, then the Third . . . then the Skip. The Skip goes up to the end towards which the stones are aimed, and she dictates the tactics of the game.’

  I’m already confused. ‘So the Skip’s at the far end?’

  ‘Well, some of the stones are at that end, and they’re playing down the way,’ says Jean inscrutably, taking a sip of Merlot, ‘and some of the stones are at this end and they’re playing up the way.’

  I see now: the ice is like any pitch, with a goal at each end. The Lead releases the stone so that it glides across the ice; as it travels the Second and Third sweep ahead of it with their brushes. The stone makes me think of a child potentate: everyone’s eyes are on it, and its apparently independent movement is cleverly controlled. The degree to which the Second and Third remove frost on the surface of the ice will alter the stone’s course. I watch it move gracefully between the slow-sliding Lead and the frantic sweepers, before it meets other stones in the house with a percussive knock.

  ‘This curler here, she’s going to try to read the ice . . . ’

  ‘Here! Here!’ shouts the Skip. The Lead almost does the splits as she slides forwards with the stone.

  ‘. . . Oh, it’s on the heavy side,’ says Jean, with disappointment. ‘It’s going to go right through the house I think. That hit nothing – it’s called a “fresh air” shot. You should be able to read how much of a swing there is in the ice, and then you’ve got to adjust your brush accordingly to give an adequate amount of ice for your stone to curl back in.

  ‘Now they are going to try and hit the red one right in the middle, and as it comes back, it will clip the other red one, and the two of them will split and go out. That’s if she plays the shot right. If she doesn’t, she’ll push the red onto the yellow, that’s a tricky shot. She fresh-aired her last one so she can’t afford to make a mess of this one. Oh! She’s a touch wide. You see how it’s not coming over the centre line? And she’s heavy. So she could just fresh-air this. Oh, and she is. Oh, Lizzie . . . She will not be happy.’

  Light reflects differently office that has been abraded by the stone or scuffed by the players’ feet. Grey marks are beginning to appear on the surface of the rink. ‘Do you have to make allowance for that as the game goes on?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, the ice gets keener, it gets quicker. Just with the wear on the pebble from sweeping and the feet sliding up and down. Most of the game takes place on the central area – so that ends up being keener, and if you want to play a stone slower you can do so on the outside . . . Good shot, Maggie!’

  ‘Have these players come from all over Fife?’

  ‘Oh yes indeed, the girl on the right is through from Linlithgow. Her sister who’s standing beyond her lives in Milnathort. There’s one from Braehead in Glasgow, one from St Andrews. This is a league that’s played all over.’

  Between matches, I walk down to the shore of Loch Leven. It’s a bright day, and at the jetty a few visitors are boarding a boat bound for one of the loch’s seven islands. Their tour will take in the castle where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned – and from which she later escaped. I’m more intrigued by St Serf’s Inch, an island at the far side of the loch. The monks of its priory are credited with the invention of curling in the sixteenth century, though I suspect this story should be taken with a pinch of salt. But on a cold day like today, it’s easy to imagine the lake iced over and the Augustinians making their own entertainment on the short winter days.

  Over to the north lies the village of Kinnesswood, where the father of meteorology, Alexander Buchan, was born in 1829. Buchan grew up to become a teacher but, unable to raise his voice due to a weak throat, he soon had to change career. Instead of holding forth to his pupils, he began to map the
movement of the winds across the surface of the planet. In the autumn and early winter of 1863 he observed how weather systems travelled across Europe and drew up detailed charts. In a Handy Book of Meteorology, published a few years later, he traced the route of a storm across the Atlantic from America to Northern Europe, using it to demonstrate his discovery that points of equal atmospheric pressure could be connected on paper, forming lines like the sinuous contours on maps. Buchan was the first person to use these isobars to forecast future weather conditions, as meteorologists still do today. Another of his theories, the Buchan Spells, has been discredited. He proposed that the smooth transition of temperatures through the year was subject to nine predictable interruptions, which he attributed to changing pressure patterns at certain times of year. The first Buchan Cold Spell is supposed to fall during the week before Valentine’s Day; the first Buchan Warm Spell is in the second week of July. I check his chart: the next spell on the cards is a cold one, between 6 and 13 November. I mark my calendar, and sure enough, I draw my curtains on 7 November to see the first frost.

  Curling ice comes and goes according to season, just like natural ice. Outside the eight-month curling calendar, which runs from September to April, many players defect to the golf course. Meanwhile, the iceman cleans the empty rink. He switches off the refrigeration system. As the ice melts he removes the slush from the concrete pit. He checks the gas supply and cleans the fittings, and carefully repairs any chips in the paintwork.