Weather

Roger Cave came to live in Highfields in 1940, the year he was born.
Extract
I think the winters tended to be a bit colder than they are now, perhaps for a couple of weeks we would have a heavy fall of snow and it would freeze over, so we used to go sledging.

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Mr Tirthram Hansrani came to live in Highfields in the late 1940s.
Extract
The Highfields area was nice then. It was a family area. It was a peaceful area. The weather used to be so cold. It would snow heavily and be very foggy. There used to be more snow then.

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Mr Abdul Haq came to live in Highfields in 1963.
Extract
It was cold. Worst winter I can remember was in 1947 – very bad, knee high snow, buses were stopped.

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Mrs Hazel Jacques came to Highfields in 1942.
Extract
/HL When they had the 1947 bad winter, the snow was about 6 foot high with 'walls' all along the road. We had to dig gaps for people to cross the road.

Oh dear!

Yeah! When it started to thaw there was water everywhere. There was a big manhole cover at the park gates. The water started coming up through the ground so we had to go and tell everybody to put a plank across so that people didn't fall in the hole! We always had floods in our cellar where the coal was, and the water came right up the cellar steps!

We had to wade through the water, but the year was very bad. Ma had thought about the cellar being flooded, so we had some coal put outside the back door. The only trouble with that was that all the snow fell off the roof and it was buried! Buried under about 6 foot of snow!

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Mr Amarjit Singh Johl came to Highfields in 1964.
Extract
The weather in Punjab is extremely hot in the summer with freezing nights in winter, but you have sunshine during the day time. Here the winter is very dark, cold and gloomy. I did not like it at all.

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Mr Charan Singh came to Highfields in the 1950s.
Extract
The weather from September onwards was very foggy and misty. For about 5-6 months I did not see the sun. During November toFebruary it would be snowing. I found it very difficult to walk. So everybody used to get together and walk to and back from work.

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Councillor Farook Subedar came to live in Highfields in 1972.
Extract
When we came the winter months were very severe. In recent years I haven't found the weather to be so harsh. You are lucky nowadays that the winter is mild. I don't know what the reasons are only the scientists can tell us that, but when we came in 1971, I remember it was a winter month when we arrived and the snow was up to your knees in London. We used to ring our cousins in Blackburn and Leicester and Birmingham and tell them not to visit as the roads were blocked with snow. But nowadays when winter comes you hardly realise there is winter. It's so mild.

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Mrs Joan Hands came to live in Highfields in 1940.
Extract
The Big Freeze, Winter 1947. The snow came in the night. We had been warned on the radio, but not to expect anything like that. I could hardly see out of the back window, there was so much piled up on the wide window-sill. Opening the front door was not an easy task either, regardless of the cold blast that swept through the house when my mother tried. Dad had to dig his way out to the shed with the coal shovel, normally kept by the fire and not intended for tackling a three-foot layer of fluffy, crystalline snow. Our friends had ventured out too and soon the street was filled with whoops and screams as snowballs hurtled through the bitter cold air. I do not think I enjoyed that part much, but one had to endure it to be part of the gang.

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