ABSTRACT
The blistering summer of 1995 was drawing to a close and the conversation in the ‘Red Lion’ had once again turned to the heat and the drought. In the corner seat of the public bar old Fred was holding forth, as was his habit when the weather was discussed. After all, his memory went back so much further than everyone else's.
Of course, you young fellers ain't old enough to remember ‘47. Now there was a year. We wuz snowbound for months, two feet deep it were, drifts up to the top o' the houses even in the middle of March, last remnants didn't vanish till April. An' when the snow went we wuz flooded for two weeks, and to cap it all there was an ‘urricane which took the roof off the village school. And then we ‘ad the ‘ottest summer in living memory, in the nineties by May, not a drop of rain through the whole of August, and that was the summer Denis Compton hit nigh on four thousand runs with eighteen ‘undreds.
