Dear Editor,
Your recent articles in The Irish Times took me down memory lane to a significant weather event from February 1947 – an intense snowfall. In those years, I was a nine-year-old lad, attending the Christian Brothers School in Mitchelstown, within the beautiful county of Cork. One morning, we were greeted by an unexpected blanket of snow, roughly a foot, enveloping our entire area.
Our school, situated close to the monastery on Upper Cork Street, could be reached by a long passage. Following the snowfall, the monastery Brothers tasked the school caretaker with carving a path through the snow down this passage to facilitate the students’ journey to school. However, his well-intentioned labour was comically undermined when we playful kids decided to bypass the cleared path and instead, trekked through the fresh, deep snow to reach the school.
In those olden times, we sported short trousers and snug knee socks as part of our school attire, which naturally soaked through due to the snowy escapade. As a consequence, there we were in our classroom, attempting to focus on our lessons by Mr O’Callaghan, while our soaked socks and boots warmed themselves on the central heating pipes. Indeed, those were some joyful, unforgettable days.
Kind regards,
TONY GREANY,
Mornington,
County Meath.