It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.

Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.

It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.

The crisp path through the field in this December snow, in the deep dark, where we trod the buried grass like ghosts on dry toast.