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Yorkshire lass Janice Martin emailed us with a beautiful poem written by her mother Edna Dolphin (nee Stephenson), who was born in 1935 at a place called Cowling in North Yorkshire and went to the local County school there.
Incidentally, it was the same village school where Lord Warton, Philip Snowden the first Chancellor of the Exchequer, was educated in his early years.
In her schooldays, when she wrote this poem, Edna was a country girl living at Stott Hill Farm.
She now lives at Sutton-in-Craven near Keighley, West Yorkshire, and the following poem is from a book of her poetry published in aid of the oncology unit at her local Airedale Hospital.
THE SNOW OF FOURTY-SEVEN
I remember the big snow, of forty-seven,
To a child of about twelve, your idea of heaven.
It seemed to snow, just day after day,
Oh how I did wish, I could go out and play.
It snowed and it snowed, and it snowed until,
It reached to my bedroom window sill.
An idyllic scene, all covered in white
The hills, roads, and wall tops, all lost from sight.
If you went for a walk, you were striding through cliffs,
With swirls and curls, of ten foot high drifts.
We'd set off for school, with our wellies and spade,
To dig our way through, for a path to be made.
We all leapt for joy, when Jack Frost did his worst,
And our teachers announced, 'The school boiler has burst'.
The icicles, hung there like great stalactites,
We would suck them like lollies, we had snowball fights.
Rolled a snowball along, till it came to a stop,
Then we did one much smaller, to put it on top.
Put in coal for the eyes, and a large carrot nose.
A scarf round the middle, lest our snowman he froze.
He froze that's for sure, but he looked awfully nice,
When the big thaw set in, he was just solid ice.
He took such a long time to thaw out and melt,
That his scarf slowly slipped, till it looked like a belt.
When the snow had all gone, I felt really quite sad,
But no one could steal all the fun I'd had.
It really was great, a child's dream of heaven,
That memorable snow, of nineteen forty-seven. Edna Dolphin (nee Stephenson)
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