In the small hours of 7 January 1982, the snow began to fall. And fall. And fall. It didn’t relent for 36 hours, blanketing Breconshire beneath a shroud of white and causing all life to grind to a halt.
I have a clear childhood memory of watching from my frozen farmhouse window as my ever-present mountain companions became Alpine, before vanishing altogether in a vast alabaster panorama. Our family home, like so many other farms and villages, was sealed away behind sweeping drifts.
My dad was forced to trudge miles to feed his snow-stuck stock. My mum urged my brother and I to play carefully, as a visit to the doctor would be an impossibility. My younger brother duly responded to this request by ice skating his way across the frozen kitchen floor to a broken arm.
Childhood winters are always whiter in our minds than they probably were in reality. As Dylan Thomas observed, “December in my memory is as white as Lapland”. But 1982 really was such a winter. Both achingly beautiful and eerily bleak, the mountains truly became
