by Chloe Mayer
I went upstairs to peel off my wet clothes and gasped as the air hit my bare chest. My teeth were chattering as I pulled two jumpers over my head. They were too small for me so I had to wrestle with them to get dressed. Then I wrapped my eiderdown around me like a cloak and went down to the sitting room to build up the fire and wait for her. She’d need my help to get back in.
I was too restless to read or even to listen to the wireless. So I just waited in the silence for her muffled footsteps. I dozed, now and then. After a while, I crossed to the window to see if I could see her coming. But there was just a vast, empty white world. So I went back to my eiderdown nest in the armchair.
Snowflakes began to fall again. They weren’t delicate flecks but big and solid – each piece a cluster of several flakes frozen together – and they stormed down furiously.
The thick flurries meant I could barely see to the end of the garden gate when I climbed up to look out of the window now. But I knew that the endless whiteness I’d seen earlier was steadily growing and spreading. I sat down again. I’d just have to wait until I heard her banging at the door. She’d be home from her walk soon; nobody would stay out in that.
I stoked the fire, and watched the flickering flames.
After a while, it became too dark to see the snow falling. I switched on the side table light and suddenly I could only see myself and the room reflected in the black glass. It was odd, this mirror image; like looking into another world with another me in it. It looked the same, but different. It looked warm and cosy because of the fire, and the yellowy light of the lamp.
If she’d turned back as soon as the snow started, then surely she should be home by now. Was that right? I tried to work out the timing in my head. How long had she been gone before the snow fell? I wasn’t sure, but that amount of time must have passed already, so if she walked in a line then turned around when the snow came, then … Ah, but I hadn’t calculated for the deeper drifts she’d be walking through, and the thick snow cluttering up the air, which would make it harder to see. And then, I hadn’t thought about where she’d have ended up. Maybe she was still there. She’d gone towards the forest. Perhaps she was sheltering under some evergreens until the blizzard passed. Or – unlikely; I never wanted to go there again – but maybe she’d gone to the cabin, the shed, to think about … him. Perhaps she was waiting inside, and would set off when the snow stopped. Maybe she’d even gone to Farmer Dawson’s house – overcoming her usual pains to avoid him, so she could wait in the warm? That made sense. That’s what she must have done. I leaned back in the chair, the eiderdown around my shoulders.
But I couldn’t settle. I was ready to jump up as soon as I heard her. But the snow didn’t stop and she didn’t come.
I waited and waited. Something was gnawing at my insides now. This waiting, these feelings … I was waiting for her to come back, just like Hansel had once waited for me. I couldn’t bear to think about that so I got up again, climbing onto the windowsill to look outside. I squinted, trying to spot her white face in the dark of the night, or her dark coat against the white of the snow. But I couldn’t see either of these things.
I went to the kitchen to check I hadn’t somehow missed her going around to the back garden. She wasn’t there either. I returned to my post at the armchair.
Oh! What I was thinking? What if she was hurt? Lying somewhere with a sprained ankle? I remembered how she’d stumbled and how slippery the snow was. And all the while, I was just sitting here in an armchair in front of the fire. I had to get outside; I had to look for her. An old thought – the sort of thought I hadn’t had since I was nine – jumped into my head: I could save her!
It was an effort to get last year’s winter coat over my layers of clothes, and my boots felt too small as well, but I tugged them on impatiently. I pulled on my woolly hat and gloves. I’d find her! I’d help her home.
I struggled with the front door until I realised it wouldn’t open, then ran to the kitchen. But I slammed into the back door as I pushed down the handle, expecting to run straight through into the garden; the old snow we’d managed to push back slightly had collapsed and fallen back against the door, and mounds and mounds of new snow on top of that now held it closed like a vice.
Using the weight of my whole body, I threw myself against it, as if I were a ball bouncing against a brick wall, but that’s just what it felt like; like I was slamming against bricks and concrete. I started to panic and shoved, using all my strength, groaning as I strained to make it move. I thought of how I’d found Mother doing this, just hours earlier. I began to cry as I remembered how it had taken two of us to get the door open just a little way. Now there was only me.
I cursed myself for being so small and scrawny, and I cursed myself for all that wasted time when I’d just sat there and allowed the snow to shut me in. Then I remembered the windows – but the downstairs ones opened outwards and were almost completely covered by snow too. I ran from room to room upstairs – thinking I could jump out, since my landing would be cushioned – but the same thing that stopped the front door from working must have happened to them, too. They were frozen shut. Should I smash one? Mother would be very angry when she found out. And it would let in the cold and snow and the house would be freezing, and we wouldn’t be able to get it fixed until the snow disappeared and the village went back to normal. In any case, if I jumped onto the snow, wouldn’t I be heavy enough to sink down into it? It would be up over my head – how could I walk around in that and hope to bump into Mother? No. I wouldn’t be able to get out and find her. She’d have to make her own way home, because it would certainly take the two of us – one pushing, one pulling at a door or window – to get her inside.
I didn’t mean to sleep – I didn’t think I’d be able to – but I must have drifted off. When I woke up, my neck hurt from where my head had laid awkwardly against the armrest. It was dark, apart from the lamp next to me. It was still night then, and Mother had still not come home. I looked at the window. The snow now completely covered the glass and was a lighter colour at the top, with an almost blue-ish tinge to it. Why was that? I didn’t realise until I went to the toilet upstairs. It wasn’t dark outside at all. It was a new day.
It was cold in the house; the fire in the sitting room was just embers. But I shivered because of the feeling inside me, which was colder than the icy air in the bathroom. She’d been gone all night.
As I watched, it began to snow again. I pictured Mother in Farmer Dawson’s house, or in a cottage on the lane, after she’d reluctantly agreed to spend the night. She might be looking at the weather herself somewhere right now, and saying to somebody, ‘Well, I can’t set out just yet, I’ll wait until later – I’m sure it’ll clear up soon.’ Not everyone in the village had a telephone, so probably she had no way to let me know she was safe. I thought of the telephone as I trudged back downstairs, trailing my eiderdown cloak behind me. I didn’t want to worry any of my grandparents, but … She’d been gone all night. A sudden urge gripped me to hear Granny’s comforting voice. She wouldn’t be able to help really, all that way away in Norfolk, but she might know what I should do. And she would be someone to talk to, while I waited for Mother to arrive.
I’d never actually placed a call on the telephone, but I knew how to do it. I started to feel better now I had some sort of plan. I’d telephone Granny, build up the sitting-room fire, then eat breakfast. I picked up the receiver.
‘Hello, operator?’
The line was dead. I pumped the buttons a couple of times, making the tinny bell ring inside it, then tried again. ‘Operator? … Operator? Are you there?’
Nothing. Just static that crackled and sounded like a storm.
‘Hello? Can you hear me? Operator?’
That was that, then. The snow must’ve brought the telephone lines down. How could the flimsy wires, the frail wooden posts, survive it? Even if they could, how could the telephone operators get to the telephone exchange when the roads were blocked, and
the trains couldn’t run, and the whole country was shutting down?
I stayed looking at the useless telephone for a while. I didn’t want to turn back to the gloomy room and think about what I had to do – make the fire, and get some food, and wait for Mother. She thought she could slip out and get home in time, but she’d misjudged it, and now it might be a few days before I saw her again. My teeth began chattering and I wasn’t really sure if it was because I was frightened, or because I was cold.
I’d be here alone, without her. That was something I’d been terrified of my whole life. Everything I’d done, all those terrible things when I was nine, all of it was for her; I just wanted to stop her leaving me.
37
He sat pondering his patterns of ice, thinking and thinking …
From The Snow Queen
The first few days I fell into a sort of routine. I’d get up to make the fire, eat bread and butter for breakfast – which I kept on the sideboard so I didn’t have to go to the freezing kitchen – and would then pass the rest of the day trying to entertain myself, stopping for lunch and dinner when I got too bored, or too hungry. I made powdered eggs, nibbled on sandwiches and crackers, or would heat tinned tomatoes on the fire and eat them straight from the can.
I wandered aimlessly around the house. In Daddy’s room, I remembered all the clothes he had in his wardrobe and pulled on some of his trousers, his jumpers – rolling up the legs and arms. They were more comfortable and I felt warmer. They didn’t smell like him – they smelled of mothballs – but it was like being surrounded by him anyway. I wore his winter coat, and wrapped the eiderdown cloak around me.
I read. I listened to the wireless – singing along to big-band songs, and listening to the broadcasters talk about the snow, and how several programmes would have to be cancelled because nobody could get in to perform them. As the weather worsened, the wireless gradually stopped working. Occasionally, the lights went out and I remembered newscasters saying power stations were struggling to get enough coal to create electricity. That was all; nothing to be scared of, sitting there in a buried house alone in the dark. There was just one candle in the kitchen drawer, and it didn’t last long. I hated the dark, the waiting, because I couldn’t help thinking – was this how Hansel felt? Before he—Was this my punishment? Every now and then I checked the telephone, but it just crackled and hissed at me.
Once I ran up and down the stairs to keep warm. It worked, but then I got sweaty, which made my clothes feel cold against my skin as soon as I cooled down. There was still a fair bit of coal left, and I was glad Mother had thought to make me fill not just the three large scuttles, but several buckets next to the fire in case we weren’t able to get outside to the coal cellar.
It wasn’t long before I realised I should be rationing my food. I started skipping lunch. When the last of the bread turned mouldy I toasted it all on the fire and ate it in one go, with globs of icy butter on it to take away the rank taste. The meat was long gone, and only a few tins remained in the larder. I started skipping dinner.
Gradually, I stopped leaving the sitting room unless I really had to. It was too cold in the rest of the house; I might as well have been outside. It was better to stay down here, even though it was dark. I started peeing into a metal bucket that had once held coal, although I’d go up to use the toilet if I needed to do more than pee. But I didn’t need to very often. My tummy was hard and swollen; nothing would come out. I wasn’t eating enough, I suppose.
Sometimes I cried. Hating myself all the while; I was twelve, after all. It wasn’t like I was a little boy.
If the cottages next door had been closer, I might have banged on the walls in the hope of hearing a comforting knock in reply. But no one would hear, so I didn’t bother. The snowdrifts almost hid the houses opposite from view and I never saw anyone at the windows when I looked outside.
I slept a lot, curled up in the armchair. I dragged down bedcovers from my mother’s room as well as my own and slept beneath all of them. I stuffed towels against the bottom of the sitting-room door to stop the draught getting in through the crack. I did the same to the front door and the one into the back garden. I always slept all night and again for hours during the day. Whenever I woke up, I could feel the cold had somehow seeped inside my cocoon. The covers were so cold, they felt wet. I would squeeze them in my hands to try to tell if there was water in them. There was ice inside the windows in the mornings, and all day throughout the rest of the house. A large crack appeared in the pane of glass in the bathroom. I started skipping breakfast every other day. I thought about food a lot. Sometimes my tummy hurt and made strange noises.
It started to feel like hard work to get up for any reason, and it seemed to take longer and longer to get the fire started. My mind felt slow, foggy. I couldn’t imagine how I’d had the energy to run up the stairs once, let alone several times in a row for no reason. When was that? A week ago? Two? I started to count the days in my head but got muddled and gave up. Of all the food we’d had in the house, only a small knob of butter was left now. It froze solid each night after the fire died as I slept. Every other day I chipped at it in the mornings and ate the pieces that flaked off. I sucked them so they’d melt, and the taste would make my mouth water even though I was eating.
It was strange, but I didn’t really feel the cold any more. My fingers looked almost blue whenever I took my gloves off, but I couldn’t feel them at all. I might have taken some of my layers off, if only I had the energy.
One day, I forced myself to the kitchen to fill my jugs with water to take back to the sitting room. I was so tired that day, it seemed easier to crawl rather than walk, although it was difficult with the eiderdown around my shoulders and my baggy clothes, and with two jugs hooked over the fingers of one hand. When I finally reached the sink and stood up to turn on the tap, nothing came out. I stared at it. Turned it off, then on again – all the way round, as far as it would go. The pipes had frozen. Of course they had. It was a wonder they hadn’t before.
I felt so tired I couldn’t even force myself back to the relative warmth of the sitting room. I sat down on the floor and watched my white breath as it puffed in front of my face, like tiny clouds. I wondered if I would die. I wondered how that made me feel.
After a while I dragged myself back to my chair in front of the fire. There didn’t seem anything else to do. Should I write Mother a note? Explain I’d tried my best. That I didn’t blame her. That I hoped she was getting on all right at whoever’s house she was staying in. I could write to Daddy, too, and Granny and Grandpa and my other grandparents. I could leave the letters out on the sideboard, just in case. But I was so sleepy. I’d have a little nap first.
… Snow is just frozen water, isn’t it? I thought when I woke up. The house was surrounded by water. There was water everywhere.
I fetched a rolling pin from the kitchen and climbed the stairs. Dragging myself up as if it were a mountain. I didn’t have much energy, and I was slow – but I was thirsty. Thirst was more powerful than hunger, I discovered. Snow hadn’t quite covered the whole cottage and there was still some natural light upstairs. I gripped the rolling pin in my gloved hands and banged the end of it against the crack in the bathroom window. Thoughts of Mother being angry about the broken glass didn’t worry me now.
I felt dizzy and had to rest by sitting on the side of the bath for a minute. It was all right; I just hadn’t recovered from climbing the stairs, that was all. This plan would let more cold in, but it was a plan and it was good. I’d pile snow up high onto a tray and carry it downstairs to put in jugs and bowls and saucepans. I hadn’t thought to bring a tray up with me. No matter, I’d use a picture frame that was hanging up on the landing. After a while I attacked the window again and the glass finally broke after a few more tries. I punched a hole through it with the baton, and the glass was mashed into the snow behind the pane. I pulled the shards out and dropped them into the sink. Then I scooped a handful of snow into my mouth. I took a
nother handful, and another. It took a long time to quench my thirst; a mouthful of snow did not turn into a mouthful of water. But it meant I probably wouldn’t die. Not yet, anyway. I wondered how that made me feel. It was cold and I felt ice coating my throat as I swallowed. And I did it again, and again, drinking the snow until I felt like I was made of it.
38
She was the Snow Queen! … ‘Are you still cold?’ she asked, and kissed his forehead. Her kiss was colder than ice. It went right to his heart … He felt as though he were about to die.
From The Snow Queen
The snow was melting. I supposed that was good. The wireless started playing again, but the serious-sounding announcers in London spoke of terrible flooding across the country as yards of snow turned to water in the roads and snowmelt ran into rivers that burst their banks. They described cars floating down the streets like boats, while houses lost their ground floors to the rising floods. Entire herds of sheep and cattle were dead, as the animals froze or starved or drowned. Quite a lot of people had probably died the same way, I thought, but I switched the wireless off because I didn’t want to hear about that. Densford River was not far away, but Bambury was high up with old mines beneath it and I didn’t think flooding would be a problem here.
I was tired all the time. I didn’t know why I was so exhausted when I was barely doing anything. Clearing out the ashes and making a new fire each morning seemed harder and took longer each new day. I decided to leave the wireless on all the time, so I didn’t have to get up to turn it on or off – even if they did say things I didn’t want to hear. Voices came and went as the announcers made it into the studios or they didn’t, and as the electricity worked or it didn’t. When the voices weren’t there, I listened to the static that sounded like a storm.