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| A story from the 2007 Reunion at the Darley Tearooms. The DET July 30, 2007. |
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One of the fondest memories of the wartime Old Centaurs was of the Great Freeze of 1946-47 which, for any schoolboy worth his salt, was a dream come true - as John Garratt recounts. IF THERE IS one anniversary in the long history of Central School deserving a boyhood celebration, it is the winter of 1946-47. We gazed hopefully up at the heavens as the first flakes fell on November 15, 1946, and wondered if they would settle. Four months later they were still with us -- the longest and harshest winter in living memory: Six foot drifts blocked roads, villages were cut off, transport was paralysed and factories ground to a halt. But up at Darley, the activity had never been more frenzied or exciting - or the injuries more numerous. The great Darley sledge run took a steady toll of victims, as school captain Arnie Parr recalled in his annual reunion address to the Old Centaurs at Darley Park tearooms. Still bearing the scars of the Great Freeze of 60 years ago, Arnie
said wryly: "fortunately, health and safety hadn't been invented in
those days. My chums would have killed me if I'd got sledging banned."
The icy blast ripped through the house and chilled us to the bone. We hunched over our desks, seeking a glimpse of a tiny fire struggling for life in the grate. Between lessons, we jostled for a place round it, but the idea of going home never entered our heads. When the lunchtime bell rang, we raced to the sledge slopes with joyous abandon. Ken Smith smashed into a tree and broke his pelvis. Arnie hit another toboggan at speed and finished up in hospital with facial injuries. On 42 days of that exceptional winter, the temperature sank to freezing point and, as the thermometer tumbled, the speed on the sledge slopes increased. In a record-breaking run, Don Lee crashed into the boathouse and only just escaped a dip in the river. Said Don: "We had been trying for days to reach the boathouse and the run was getting faster and faster. When I finally did it, I thought, ‘Well, that's that, then’. It never crossed my mind that I might finish up in the river because I was young and had no fear. Now I look back on it and think what a blithering idiot I was.” Today, 60 years after his boyhood feat. Don still has his precious sledge. It has travelled the country with him during his long career. “My wife is always telling me that we have too much rubbish here," he said. “But I tell her that where I go that sledge goes.” At Darley the number of patched-up schoolboy grew ever larger but authority made no attempt to ban our sport. Boys must learn to take hard knocks. It was part of our preparation for life. We accepted the challenge enthusiastically and bore our wounds proudly. The daily trek from the park gates down to the hall became a long and hazardous descent. Arnie recalls: “It was our ambition to slide the whole length of the drive and each day we got a bit closer. The path was turned into sheet ice and, if we couldn’t stay on our feet, we slid down on our satchels. But I can’t remember seeing a master on his backside.” Lessons became a torment as we returned, damp or sodden, from the park and shivered our way through afternoon school, deaf to the complexities of French verbs, English syntax and algebraic equations. The final snow fell on March 10 after which the Great Freeze was followed by the Great Thaw – and a glorious summer. Once more Arnie and his chums found themselves back at their desks after school laboriously copying out 100 times the fateful words: “The woods are out of bounds and I will not enter them again.” Life at Darley had returned to normal. |
