Bum note of Esso Blue lantern

YOU can bank on it can’t you? A little cold weather and the UK grinds to a halt. A few flakes of snow on London and it’s the main story on the Nine o’Clock News.

The recent cold snap set me thinking back to my childhood — and I’m old enough to remember the winter of 1963 when even the sea froze. Things were so bad that there was no football played for two months and that’s when they invented the Pools Panel.

Yet — and accuse me of being a grumpy old man if you like — we were never off school. We went in every day even though it was sometimes so cold that the milk froze. However, that was much preferable to the little bottles being left by the radiators so that they were liquid but sickly warm when you went to drink them.

For the same reason, I always turned down any left-over milk that was offered in the afternoon, usually after it had spent all day on a windowsill in the sun.

But one thing that sticks in my mind about the cold winters of old is the need for a hurricane lamp in the outside lavvy. Everyone was terrified of burst pipes in cold weather. Do they still happen?

The hurricane lamp, a sort of lantern, ran on (bum, bum, bum, bum) Esso Blue — remember the cartoon man who advertised it on telly? One of my errands used to be to call at Cooper’s hardware shop on King Street with a couple of pop bottles which he would fill from a sort of barrel. No doubt highly illegal now.

My children laugh at me when I talk about the toilet, shovels of coal on the fire and tin baths, but having been brought up in a two-up two-down I remember them well.

I would do anything (well almost) to avoid going to the toilet at night and would always insist on a torch. Well, there might have been spiders and slugs in there. Ironically, the only time I didn’t mind going was in winter when the lamp would be there to offer heat and light.

In fact, I’m so old that I remember us having something called a tippler toilet. I think everything caught in a large bucket which eventually tippled over into the sewer.

But at least our toilet was in the back yard. Mrs Brennan, who minded me, had to go out of her gate and down the back where a block of four toilets stood yards from anywhere. What did they do when they were ill?