WHEN WINTER CAME...

It was falling very gently at first and then it gradually became heavier and heavier. I rushed to the window, opened it, stretched my hand out and there it was snowflakes. Snow! Something I sang about from early childhood — "Dashing through the snow, in a one horse open sleigh / O’er the fields we go, laughing all the way"... et cetera. That’s the Jingle Bells song that everyone knows. What a wonderful time to be in England!

At breakfast, the students who had experienced winter before, were grumbling about the coldness. I thought it would be fun to walk bareheaded with the snow falling on my hair but I soon realised my head was freezing. Everything in sight was slowly being covered with a white blanket of snow. The English folks in the tube were in hibernation and, as usual, buried their noses in their newspapers.

At the Embassy Theatre, the home of the Central School of Speech and Drama, it surprised me to hear fellow teachers use disparaging adjectives to describe the snow such as "bloody," "disgusting," "horrible," and one or two unprintable words.

There were only three black students in the entire school of about two hundred. The three of us — a girl from Sierra Leone, a man from Kenya and I were among the 18 in the drama teachers’ class. I asked one of the white girls why they were cursing the snow. She said, "Oh, this is your first experience of winter. I give you a week and you’ll be cussing too."

As pedestrians walked on the snow, it became dirty, black, hard and slippery. You had to be very careful with all that slush on the sidewalks and in the streets. After a few days of it, I had enough. Winter was not wonderful for me. Obscene language had never been part of my vocabulary. Love at first sight was short lived but I could not curse the snow’s mother. Remembering the verse from the poem "The King’s Ring" by Theodore Tilton, this maxim became my slogan - "Even this will pass away."

When I blew my nose I was shocked to see a bloody handkerchief and my lips were cracked and sore. Chapsticks had to be applied to solve that problem. Attending rehearsals for plays in winter was an agonising undertaking for me. A rain storm is joke compared to a blinding snow storm.

I foolishly thought as I consisted mainly of skin and bones that I was feeling the coldness the most, but a big fat guy in the class would rush to the heater before everybody else.

The stage movement classes with all that physical activity including ballet, could not produce one drop of perspiration from my skin. Even when wearing masks, gloves, white duck trousers and padded jacket in the fencing classes and thrusting with ?p?e or foil, I failed to sweat.

With winter raging on the outside, inside the greenhouse at Kew Gardens the temperature was over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. At last, I was in my natural habitat enjoying myself, perspiring among tropical plants and flowers and even coconut trees.

The headline of this article reads, "When Winter Came..." The three periods represent three words which are My Horrors began."

After experiencing my first and last winter, I have come to the conclusion that I love to see snow only at a distance and a long one at that. The apostle Paul believes we should be thankful always in whatever situation we find ourselves. A modern preacher tells us, "if you pause to think, you will find cause to be thankful to God."