Frostquake by Juliet Nicolson review: convincing, poetic and touching

It’s January, the weather is abysmal, rebellion is in the air after 11 years of Tory rule, and a silent killer is spreading across the land. There’s even a bitter divide over Britain’s future relationship with Europe.

This is 1963, not 2021, but Juliet Nicolson’s timely study of that pivotal winter in British history has so many parallels with today that it occasionally sends a shiver down your spine - and not just because she describes temperatures so cold that people were dying in their stranded cars.

Nicolson was eight years old when the snow began falling on Boxing Day 1962. Her own memories of the turbulent months before and after that day are the thread that hold this beautifully stitched patchwork of stories together.

Readers of her previous books will know that Nicolson’s was no ordinary childhood. As the grandchild of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, she had spent that Christmas at Sissinghurst, the romantic Kent castle her father had inherited on the death of his mother earlier that year. Her family had five gardeners, a cook and a chauffeur, while 15 million people in Britain still had no plumbed-in bathroom and six million shared a lavatory with their neighbours. It was the continued existence of social divisions like these which precipitated many of the revolutionary changes she charts in this book.

Throughout 1962, the cracks that would cause these seismic shifts were beginning to appear. Any lustre that prime minster Harold Macmillan had had when he made his 1957 “never had it so good” speech was disappearing fast. He was Britain’s last Victorian-born leader, a relic who looked absurdly outmoded as he posed for pictures with the dashing young President Kennedy in Nassau that December. He was under pressure from every angle; from industrial action, from Russia’s nuclear threat, from the gossip about the looming scandal around his cabinet minister John Profumo, and from the new breed of satirists poking fun at him on television’s hit new programme, That Was the Week That Was. He was ill-equipped to deal with this rapidly changing world, not least, as Nicolson notes, because “the only television at Birch Grove, his home in Sussex, was in the servants’ hall”.

The shadow of Macmillan’s increasingly desperate figure hangs over many of the events in this book. These include the Profumo Affair, the Beatles’ rise to stardom, and the gradual mental collapse of the poet Sylvia Plath. Nicolson also digs behind the headlines about race relations, homosexuality, ecology and the changing role of women, which were all hot news topics that winter.

Nicolson’s family was not immune to what their nanny called the “newfangled carry-on”, and we hear how her own life reflected the changing times. She danced the twist for her grandmother Vita just before her death, learnt new words like “groovy”, “super” and “with it”, and enjoyed the outlandish window displays in Bazaar, Mary Quant’s hip boutique on the King’s Road.

But what really brought everything to a head - as well as marking an unforgettable divide between the old world and the new - was “the great freeze”, which lasted from Boxing Day until early March 1963. By the end of the Christmas holidays the snow was over two feet thick in the south of England, and in Kent the sea was frozen a mile out from the beach. Temperatures were the coldest they had been since 1814, “low enough to freeze human flesh”.

Against this icy backdrop, a series of events took place which in their different ways marked a shift between the old Britain and the new. On 14 January, General de Gaulle gave his famous “non” speech, a big but temporary blow to Britain’s attempt to join the European Economic Community. On 18 January, the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell died unexpectedly, paving the way for Harold Wilson’s rise to become the next great modernising prime minister. 

On 11 February, Sylvia Plath, having recently completed the poems that would make her reputation, took her own life in her London flat. On the same day, just over a mile away, the Beatles recorded their first album at Abbey Road Studios.