A boy's own yarn from the Sixties' big freeze

This is not so much a Christmas tale as a winter's tale. It happened some time after Boxing Day in 1962, writes Peter Rhodes.

That was when the snow began to fall in what would become known as the Big Freeze. We had a green Christmas but within a week the whole country was under snow. Parts of Wales saw drifts 20 feet deep and the sea was frozen for a mile off the Kentish coast.

On one bright Saturday in this white hell, a gang of us lads decided to walk to the Saxon Mill.

It was about three miles away across the meadows from our little corner of Leamington Spa.

We had walked there a dozen times in the summer, pausing on the old plank bridge over a spur of the Avon to watch pike lazing in the dappled shallows.

Two things make that mad, midwinter trek special. The first was a cold so intense you could smell it. The second, something so precious that we should never take it for granted, was the company of good friends.

My earliest memories, up to the age of six, are set in Kington, Herefordshire, where I enjoyed a glorious existence with loads of playmates. All I recall are sunny days and expeditions into the woods. We wore Davy Crockett hats and carried flintlock muskets (old chair legs) cradled in the crook of our arms. We were cowboys and pirates, rustlers and outlaws.

And suddenly, that life ended. Dad took a new job in Oxfordshire and we were uprooted and set down in Bicester.

It was a wretched time. I had never been bullied before. At Bicester my brother and I were systematically isolated and tormented.

We were different from the market-town kids. We spoke with a Herefordshire burr. Raised as Methodists, we didn't understand the incense and the genuflecting of this strange high-Anglican school. The other kids thought we were posh.

The bullying got so bad that my brother, just seven, ran away from home. The police found him a mile up the road with a silver star badge. He told them he wanted to get to America and be a sheriff.

After a hateful year in Bicester we moved to Leamington. It was like entering another country.

School was wonderful, the other kids were great. We fitted in and made new friends. As the years turned, we grew in confidence and in companionship.

We grew up in an age when boys were allowed to be boys, turfed out of the house on Saturday morning and not expected back before tea.

For a gang like ours, the Big Freeze was a challenge which could not be ignored. We grabbed some biscuits, wrapped up warm, told our Mums some nonsense about being at each others' houses, and stomped off into the powdery whiteness.

It must have taken us about six hours to get to the Saxon Mill and back. A gentle, deceptive blanket of white covered some treacherous furrows and ditches. One moment we would be running across the field, the next floundering chest-high in drift-filled dykes.

The frozen Avon took our combined weight easily so, boys being boys, we jumped up and down until it creaked and splintered and fled, scared silly, for the bank.

We had done it. We re-entered our street like conquering heroes, like Scott or Shackleton back from the Antarctic.

The Big Freeze was to drag on for another two months. It was March 6, 1963, before a night passed without a frost anywhere in Britain.

Nearly 50 years on, as another year turns, that trek through the drifts remains with me. I feel sorry for boys born after my generation who, for all sorts of sensible reasons, are denied the chance to do epic deeds at an age when you're still dreaming of becoming cowboys and pirates. If kids today tried to do what we did, at such an age, a police search would be ordered and social services would probably get involved.

The great gift we had throughout our early years was sheer freedom.

We Antarctic trekkers of 1962 conquered the Big Freeze and came safe home with memories that last a lifetime - and not one of us was over 11.

Have a very merry Christmas.