Dicky, After all those years without street lighting the snow was a bit of a godsend. But while wearing school uniform short trousers was not very pleasant. I recall it was also impossible to make snowballs while wearing woollen gloves. Red knees, frozen hands and wet feet. Followed by a wide necked bottle of frozen solid milk (the sort with a cardboard top and a hole to punch out to insert a straw).
But making hugely long "slides" made up for all that, and any injuries weren't felt until the body had warmed up.....and than everything just hurt a lot. But thats the way it was for everyone, so it was the "norm". Other things come to mind, like having to use an outside netty, shovelling half a ton of coal into the coalhouse from where it had been dumped in the back lane. Chimneys regularly going on fire and filling the house with god-awful stink. But it was the "norm", and so the same for everybody....at least it was in the coal mining areas of Durham during the 1940s.......not forgetting the gas lights and associated "mantles". The "playgrounds" that were the local council rubbish tips. And yet we survived, and even managed to pass the 11 plus to get into a Grammar School! That was life. BY.