Cold and Snow in 1963 and Sylvia Plath

January 2009 takes me back to 1963, mid Devon and snow and cold and cold and snow, frozen thoughts and Sylvia Plath's suicide. As apparently for many other women writers of my age, living in her shadow, this is the season that takes me back to her and to the winter of the last months of her life and her final, probably greatest, poems. I like to think that for me the identification is just a little bit more intense and so to speak closer to home, because at the time my home was in North Tawton, the mid-Devon town where she lived for two years or so, until her last journey to London and death in February. After all Jill, our beloved old-English sheepdog featured in Plath's Journals written at the time and my uncle and aunt became the Hughes' new neighbours, so Sylvia and her poet husband were hot topics of conversation within family member circles.

Strange how the bitter cold reactivates that time - as though it were an image frozen on one's memory palette. And in January through to February that year we were preparing to move to a new farm and having to leave our/my beloved childhood and family home.

Grief was all around when the snow fell (worst since 1881, so the locals said). However there were the magical blisses of the white snow world in which to revel for a week or two. I was on the cusp of teenage and what a different - oh so now seemingly old-fashioned - teenage-time - it was, with the Farmer's Weekly Country Spotter club in which to keep a diary - which I still have. I noted (rather prosaically, with absolutely no precognition that one day I might try and make my own slow way as writer), how we fed the birds - "spotted" robins, blue-tits, blackbirds and sparrows - and one which my brother told me was a "coal-tit" - chased after escaped cattle and most especially, nurtured and tried to care for the lambs that were then being born; by February 24th there were "60 lambs and 10 of them are home in sheds as the nights are so cold and they are dying". I added wistfully, "we have lost quite a few but have managed to save some" and "Daddy brought one in yesterday which we put in a box in the bottom shelf of the oven - it recovered after Daddy had given it some Ovigest. He also brought one in today and we did the same thing for it. It was taken out after being in the oven for quite a long time and put in a shed with its mother, now we have just looked at it and it doesn't seem so good. This afternoon at about 4.30 we went to see the sheep and found one lamb, a little while after when we went to feed them another lamb was there and we brought it in. In the evening two lambs had to be fed out of a bottle." So my father, brother and when I felt like it, I, were rather busy. But I (still a child) could soon forget the intense grief of dying lambs; after all we were farm children and death was something we were very used to. And oh the snow was fun! My brother loved to dig himself and us and the dogs out of the snow drifts - which in some places were 5-6 feet deep - if not more.

Poetry and poets were of no real consequence to me then but my world was the best anyone could have for a poetry landscape and future poetry memory-bank. We were free to roam the white and iced country lanes and could ramble miles over fields and peer into iced over ponds (did we try and skate on them - probably yes - but we were wise in our country ways and never came to any harm) and into copses and woods where fox and other animal prints led us on to stalk wild, mystery creatures.

The date Plath died, 11th February, there are no entries in my Spotter's diary; sometimes since I have tried to imagine what I might have been doing, probably helping my father with the new lambs again or perhaps, swinging on the willow-swing for the last few times before we were gone for ever - up high you could get a wonderful vista of Cawsand beacon on the moor seven miles as the crow flies -and nearer, of the town below squatting safely and securely in the valley. When my mother and aunt began to whisper intently to each other, but shut up (looking at each other knowingly) when I approached, I knew something had happened; I think I was deemed to be too young to "understand". It was several years later I think that I really knew about the poet's suicide, which of course had occurred away in London, but all the same had repercussions in the local community.

In another month we had moved and I was on the journey to the rest of my life; Plath's poetry came to me later and it is in Winter (cold real Winter that happens rarely in the C21) that I shiver with the remembrance.