But surely every snowman built since his book is more evocative, containing more latent magic, more potential to turn into an amazing companion. When Raymond Briggs invented The Snowman he was already tapping into our sense that a figure we make, Pygmalion-like, feels like a sort of imaginary friend. Grand expeditions may be inspired by great poets and novelists larky trips to the park may be inspired by children's books. (The au pair, charmingly, had already put a home-made Piglet sitting on a log in the wood.)īut Spufford also wrote a whole book about snow and ice: I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, in which he traced a national interest in polar exploration back to Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Melville, Conrad, and the Shelleys.
He remembers looking for Piglet in the snowy woods with an au pair, recreating the Woozle-hunting episode in Winnie-the-Pooh in which Pooh and Piglet follow their own footsteps round in circles. But I think there is something more, something about snow in our imagination, born of what we have read.įrancis Spufford in The Child that Books Built talks about how our internal lives are formed by childhood reading. What other circumstances can make adults throw things amiably at each other in the street, chase each other around, stop to make something useless but aesthetically pleasing out of material that is to hand, and whiz downhill shouting Whee! before landing on top of each other in a laughing heap? Maybe we do this because there is something intrinsically play-inducing about the snow, or something Proustian that reminds us of the fun we had with it as kids that we all want to relive. We all play games, having snowball fights, hurtling down hillsides on slidy things and building snowmen. And not just, it seems, because they don t have to go to work and can t drive anywhere. The salient characteristic of the British in the snow is that they immediately become more playful, more childlike. This snowy week has made me reflect on the influence of childhood reading.
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