‘Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy.’—Andy Goldsworthy
The moment the snowball left Anton’s hand he knew exactly what was about to happen. He didn’t understand physics well enough to know how he knew, but the fact was that he did. Maybe the world ceased turning for a millionth of a second. Everything stopped and then caught up with itself, like a global ectopic heartbeat. And for that tiny fragment of time, he was treated to a view of the future. Or maybe, an inanimate object— one snowball—had suddenly taken on a life of its own, with its own needs and wants and intentions. Or maybe, the molecules of air between them suddenly parted for some reason, allowing the snowball an uninterrupted and unerring passage to its destination. He was pretty sure that if only Newton’s second law of motion had applied as normal, the snowball would have dropped well short, and what happened would never have happened.
As it was, whatever the explanation, it felt predestined that a snowball he’d aimed elsewhere should hit Mr Lanyon—a particularly charmless teacher, and there was stiff competition for that accolade—on the side of his head, knocking his glasses off.
Anton knew at that moment that he was in deep shit.
It was January 1963. The UK was entombed in snow and ice; locked in a frozen dream. By day, Brits dug themselves out of historically unprecedented drifts up to twenty feet deep, and attempted to get on with their lives. Cattle and sheep died in the iron fields. Up to half the population of wild birds perished, ninety per cent of kingfishers. The snow lay on the ground for sixty days. Milk bottles in their millions exploded on doorsteps. Night after night, the darkness crackled with bitter, occult, apparently permanent cold. The stars looked down pitilessly. The frost conjured ghosts’ breath above polluted inland waterways too rank to freeze. Extending up to a mile from the shore, the sea reared up, stilled and turned to glass. The sound of the waves on the shore ceased.
Anton was a pupil at an inner-city boys’ grammar school. The buildings were Edwardian and there was only a small tarmacked playground, with a couple of sickly yews in brick-edged beds. There was no room for ball games and, consequently, during lunch-break the boys were allowed into the nearby park—caps to be worn at all times, needless to say—to play football and cricket. Equally needless to say, they were forbidden from fraternizing in the park with the girls from the sister school—berets never to be removed. Which may explain why, more than sixty years later, the word ‘fraternize’ is for him so erotically charged. And don’t get him started on ‘berets’.
Nor was there considered to be room in the playground for snowball fights, which were strictly prohibited. Once again, if they wanted to do it, the boys had to go to the park. (Oddly, there was no rule against making lethal slides in the playground. In his seven years at the school, at least two boys broke legs skidding across the ice, and another was badly concussed. This was obviously felt not to be as significant as the risk of broken windows.)
He was normally a law-abiding member of the community, but the sight of his best mate Graham wandering unwittingly towards the tuck shop was too much for him. He picked up a handful of snow, compressed it in the palms of his hands, and lobbed it at him. At that moment, Graham turned, saw the snowball in flight and did what any reasonable person would do—ducked. It passed noiselessly over his head and hit Lanyon, who just a second ago had been a couple of yards to the left, full on.
He was instantly furious, and who could blame him? He knelt down and picked up his steel-rimmed specs which, fortunately, were undamaged. And then he turned to Anton.
Apart from the fact that he wasn’t a man of joy, the other thing you need to know is that Lanyon was a biology teacher. And biology was pretty much a second-class subject at that school. Those who were considered clever were shoe-horned, regardless of their preferences, into a classical stream, where the emphasis was on endless Latin and Greek. This created timetabling issues. These clever boys were obliged to study physics and chemistry, a modern language, maths and English Language, as these would be required for university entrance, but there were other subjects such as art, English Literature, woodwork and biology, that were simply unavailable to them. The generally unspoken feeling seemed to be that they were fine for the lower streams but were not needed by the elite. That they were not entirely serious. That they were just a bit soft.
This meant that he had never been taught by Lanyon, who possibly nursed a sense of grievance that his beloved subject was not considered important for the cleverest boys. That he was the victim of a kind of unspoken intellectual snobbery, and that the likes of Anton were the intellectual snobs. Consequently, it was unlikely that a single word had ever passed between them. Maybe if it had, Lanyon might have been more inclined to be merciful or at least to deal with Anton himself, rather than immediately escalating the issue to the headmaster, which is what—puce-faced—he did.
(Added to that was the fact that Graham was, by common consent, the prettiest boy in the entire school—chestnut curls, green eyes, a girl’s skin. A face by Raphael, and, in consequence, hated and targeted by the majority of masters, who apparently regarded his beauty as a personal affront, a challenge to their bleak and ordered view of things.)
‘Both of you, Headmaster’s office, now.’
Anton apologized but Lanyon wasn’t listening. It may be doing him an injustice—and if so, who really cares?—but his attitude seemed vengeful, born out of a long, simmering frustration at his career choice. Anton tried to explain that there was only one culprit here not two, but Mr Biology was so angry that he refused to hear him.
‘Don’t argue with me, boy. Just get inside or I’ll drag you both in by the hair.’
Anton doubted he’d be able to do this, but didn’t want to give him the chance to try.
Being sent to the headmaster could mean only one thing.
Anton’d acted instinctively but, nonetheless, had been aware of what he was doing. Graham, on the other hand, had acted reflexively, without thinking, doing what his body was designed to do. He may not have known it, but in that moment his behaviour was determined by the escape reflex. In response to potential danger—such as a snowball coming at you—the body initiates an escape motion. Dodging, or in this case, ducking. You don’t have any choice in the matter. There is no way you can switch it off, decide in the instant not to duck.
Anton subsequently read up on it and the escape response is apparently located (if that’s the right word) in the telencephalon region of the brain, which might have meant more to him if he’d known where that was or what it did. Ironically, that’s the kind of stuff he might have learned in Lanyon’s class. But, then again, probably not. He had the sense, although no evidence to back it up, that Lanyon spent his days in the company of tadpoles and fruit flies. Possibly slugs.
To punish someone for ducking would be like punishing them for their pupils changing size when a bright light was shone into their eyes, sweating in the heat, sneezing when their nostrils filled with dust, or jumping at a sudden loud noise. No one in their right mind would do such a thing. Consequently, Anton assumed that Graham, at least, was safe.
More fool him.
Such was the awe in which the headmaster was held, that boys were not allowed to approach his inner sanctum directly. Instead, they had to knock at the door of the school secretary, who would pass on the message to his Holiness (via a door linking their two offices) that another batch of miserable sinners was awaiting punishment. She was not normally a sympathetic person, but when Anton told her why they were there, he thought he spotted a glint of amusement in her eyes.
‘So, you knocked Mr Lanyon’s glasses off with a snowball?’
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
‘I see. Oh, dear. I imagine he wasn’t particularly pleased.’
Could it be that the school’s intellectual snobbery extended as far as the secretary’s office?
‘No, Ma’am.’
‘Well, I’ll tell Headmaster that you are here.’
‘Ma’am, I just want to say that Miller didn’t do anything.’
‘I’m sure Headmaster will take account of that.’
Did he detect a flicker of sympathy? Probably not.
Unlike Lanyon, the headmaster did not seem in the least vengeful. If anything, he seemed bored. Punishing boys was just one of those things in his day that had to be got through, like approving the following week’s lunch menus or working on his speech for Founders’ Day. And if you think about that for a moment, maybe you’ll see how totally weird it was. A grown man was about to unleash legalized, ritualized violence on a boy of thirteen, and that wasn’t in any way notable or unusual. It wasn’t the kind of thing he needed to give any particular thought to, or take home with him after work. He wasn’t even required to be angry. It was simply usual and tedious. Routine and impersonal.
How did he live with himself?
He’d obviously just had a cigarette; his room was full of smoke.
He said, ‘I’m sick and tired of telling you boys that snowball fights in the playground are strictly forbidden. When will you ever learn? You know, don’t you, that I’m going to have to punish you?’
So, in his version of events: it was not that he particularly wanted to punish them, but that the school rules dictated that he must. He had no choice in the matter. Talk about bad faith. Or mala fides, as those in the classical stream preferred.
Graham said nothing.
Anton said, ‘Please, Sir, Miller (first names were recherché when talking to the authorities) did nothing wrong. I threw the snowball at him. He didn’t throw anything.’
‘So you say. But Mr Lanyon has sent me a chitty claiming that both you and Miller are to blame. And unless you are prepared to challenge his version of events, you’re each going to receive four strokes of the cane.’
Honour demanded that Anton put his life on the line for Graham.
‘But, Sir, that isn’t fair.’
‘Don’t you dare talk to me about fairness. Unless you want six strokes. I’ll decide what’s fair and what’s not. Now, bend over.’
Anton looked at Graham who, almost imperceptibly, shook his head.
So, Graham and Anton were both caned for what Anton did. Anton found it hard to believe at the time, and still finds it hard to believe, that life could be so unfair. That nobody would listen to what he had to say. That the innocent could be punished along with the guilty. That teachers hated their lives so much, and took out their despair on children.
He could imagine the headmaster or Lanyon, saying, ‘Well, that’s an important life lesson for you both.’ But he was very clear that it was one he had no interest in learning.
The thing about being caned was that it hurt. A lot. Anton had to fight back the tears. He was caned first, which meant that Graham had to watch while he waited. Then Anton watched him receive his four without flinching.
Anton had seen school movies in which the custom was for the beaten to thank the beater for what had just happened. None of that nonsense applied at this school. At least, they didn’t expect pupils to express gratitude for being hurt. But they were required to shake hands with the headmaster afterwards, presumably to demonstrate that there were no hard feelings. As if. Anton shook his hand but refused to make eye contact with him. He might have to go along with this charade but he didn’t have to buy into it. The shaking of hands added a ritualistic aspect to the injuries done to them, which might make it more acceptable or less transgressive, normalize it. And he certainly had no interest in any of that. And he supposed Graham didn’t either.
They left the headmaster’s smoky lair via the secretary’s office. She said nothing. Did they detect a look of sympathy? Almost certainly not.
Back in the playground, Anton apologized to Graham, but he wasn’t having any of it.
‘Not your fault. Lanyon’s a bastard.’
‘My dear chap, I can’t take issue with your second statement, but your first is erroneous. It most certainly was my fault.’ (They thought it amusing to talk like that.)
‘Oh well, my dear old thing, it’s over now. You only did what anyone would have done in the circumstances. Might I suggest that we go to the park after school and I’ll try to extract my revenge?’
Such grace under fire.
If only the adults around them had been capable of anything like it.
When they returned to their form room after the bell, Anton was told that Lanyon wanted to see him. He couldn’t imagine why. He found him in the biology lab.
‘Did you see Headmaster?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And what happened?’
‘He caned me.’
‘He caned you what, boy?’
‘He caned me, Sir.’
‘And what about Miller?’
‘He caned him as well, Sir.’
Right up to this point, Anton’s residual respect for authority was such that he almost expected Lanyon to apologize, to say that he hadn’t meant things to go as far as they had. That he would have been satisfied with a detention.
But, of course, he didn’t.
Instead, he looked at Anton with what can only be described as malevolence, and said, ‘Well, let that be a lesson to you. School rules are there for a reason. You would do well to remember that. You may go.’
So, Anton went. Gladly. Looking back, he doesn’t think another word passed between them in his remaining five years at school. He certainly hopes not. Back then, he’s not sure why, he couldn’t decide whether he felt more bitterness towards Lanyon or towards the headmaster. The headmaster was bored at having to punish them, whereas Lanyon relished handing the task over to someone else.
These days, he’d like to think that, in retirement, perhaps while he and his wife were on a walking holiday in the Lake District, Lanyon had looked back on his career and wished he’d been nicer, gentler, more understanding; that in retrospect he couldn’t understand how he’d been so awful. But that probably didn’t happen. On the other hand, he was a sad, deeply flawed human being. Whereas the headmaster routinely hit people smaller and younger than himself who had no way of defending themselves. Probably they were as bad as each other in their own ways.
Second period that afternoon was gym. As they were getting changed, he and Graham compared bums. They both had clearly-visible scarlet welts on their butt-cheeks, a couple of which were bleeding.
Their gym master asked Graham, in his usual hectoring bark, why he was limping, so Graham told him what had been done to them. To Anton’s surprise and to his eternal gratitude, the gym master then performed a small act of kindness. And kindness in that place, at least on the part of the teaching staff, was as rare as hens’ teeth, horses’ toes or fish fingers.
‘Hurry up, boys,’ he said in a voice that would pass for gentle among the fraternity of gym teachers, if among no other demographic. ‘I won’t mind if you both take things a little easy this afternoon. Go carefully now.’
Everyone concerned appeared to feel that there was a lesson to be learned here. So, did Anton learn it? Well, he learned that to get caught breaking school rules was never a good idea. He learned that Lanyon and Headmaster were possessed of squalid souls and were best avoided. But did he learn anything about life? Did he learn to repress the urge to throw snowballs at friends? I’m afraid the answer has to be a resounding NO.
—————
Fast forward ten years, Anton’s at university, doing his best to take postgraduate research seriously.
At this precise moment, he’s standing on Oxford station. It has been snowing for days. He’s working on the Christmas post; his job is to get as many sacks of mail as possible on and off each train that comes in. The train guards don’t like being held up, are generally uncooperative, and he rarely gets more than two minutes. So, after a brief burst of frantic activity, he has to wait for the next train.
In the course of an eight-hour shift, he hears the recorded platform announcements over and over again. It sounds as though they’ve been made by someone with a speech impediment. The no doubt delightful Cotswold market town of Moreton-in-Marsh emerges from the speaker system as the terrifying and possibly post-apocalyptic ‘Noreton-en-Garsh’, where zombies roam. It isn’t that he thinks it’s necessarily a job for Richard Burton, but still…
Anton’s supervisor is a gentle, dreamy, softly-spoken, rather odd postman called Curly, who is as bald as an egg, a father of six, and an enthusiast for the recordings of Richard Tauber. He’s constantly warbling bits of Tauber’s repertoire to Anton: ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz,’ ‘Du bist meine Sonne,’ and so on. Anton doesn’t take it personally. It’s hard to know how to respond as he’s never previously heard of the guy and has zero interest in light opera. There’s another postman and another student on the opposite platform. The woman running the station café is generous with sausage rolls and cups of tea. Working here is fun.
Curly and Anton move the mail sacks around in something called a BRUTE—which stands for British Rail Universal Trolley Equipment—a three-sided, blue-painted metal cage on wheels. As the days tick towards the twenty-fifth, so the volume of mail decreases—everyone has already posted their cards and letters. Because they now have more BRUTEs than they need, Curly asks Anton if he would mind wheeling a couple of them to the very end of the platform, where they will be out of the way.
It’s quiet and dark here. None of the trains coming through is as long as the platform. There are no waiting passengers at this point, just Anton. He reflects that snow enables a kind of time travel; has transformed a late-twentieth-century station into a station of the mid-nineteenth century. He wouldn’t be totally surprised if Charles Dickens or Queen Victoria suddenly materialized out of the night.
And then he sees Henry Dangerfield, standing on the opposite platform underneath one of the station lights, about forty yards away, the snow drifting past his perfect head.
Henry is everything that he is, and some of the things Anton secretly wants to be. For a start, he’s uber-confident to a point way beyond effortless arrogance. He’s tall and imposing and has great hair. He and Anton play for the college cricket team. He opens the batting and regularly scores elegant fifties and sixties. Anton’s a second-change, seam-up bowler, a trundler who picks up the occasional lower-order wicket. In college everyone is aware of Henry: of Anton, not so much. Henry’s doing something important in the field of number theory, whereas Anton’s fiddling around half-heartedly with a minute sliver of English literature.
In other words, if anyone ever had it coming, Henry Dangerfield does. Anton is about to wreak a kind of cosmic justice; his self-appointed role is to right one of life’s myriad unfairnesses.
He melds the perfect snowball together in his gloved hands and chucks it. To be honest, he doesn’t have much hope of hitting the appalling Henry; the snowball will more than likely fall just short. But as Andy Goldsworthy observed, animal energy has a lot to answer for. The snowball disappears into the darkness as it crosses the tracks, and then suddenly reappears in the light of the lamp that Henry is so decorously and languidly standing under. And it keeps going. Anton can’t believe it. Snowballs don’t usually travel forty yards. And things get better. Something makes Henry look up. It’s as if he hears something or scents something on the wind. It couldn’t have been more perfect. The snowball hits him in the middle of his face and explodes all around his head and shoulders.
Exulting, Anton ducks down behind a BRUTE even though he thinks he can’t possibly be seen in the darkness. Henry shakes his head, brushes snow from the shoulders of his coat, and then looks around for the culprit. But there is no one—given the snowball’s trajectory, it’s obvious that it couldn’t have been launched by any of the few passengers sharing his platform. Besides, tweedy professors of classics and elderly ladies are not notorious for their snowballing proclivities. (Their loss.) And there appears to be no one opposite him on the other side of the tracks. The snowball that biffed him so wonderfully on the snoot appears to have come out of nowhere. (It seems that snowballing has its own vocabulary—chucking, biffing and snooting, and possibly even a little hallooing—straight out of Enid Blyton.) Perhaps, Henry imagines some supernatural power behind it, some vengeful spirit, some ghost of Christmas past. But since he is a mathematician, probably not.
From Anton’s point of view, the only downside to this wonderful event is that he has to remain hidden and motionless behind his trusty BRUTE for about ten minutes, until Henry’s train pulls in, he boards it and is whisked towards his destination. Anton is cold, and besides, Curly must be wondering where his ‘Sonne’ has got to. But it’s worth it. It’s worth it.
—————
The next morning, Anton took a train home for the holidays. In his suitcase was a large gift box of Walnut Whips, which Curly had presented him with at the end of their final, day-before-Christmas-Eve shift. (Anton was puzzled by this choice of gift. Why not something more popular like Mars Bars or Milky Ways, Toblerones or even Turkish Delights? He’d never previously eaten a Walnut Whip, never so much as thought of buying one, didn’t think he knew anyone who had. He’d always imagined that they were the confectionery of choice only of late-middle-aged ladies who lived in Surrey and wore gilets and floral head-scarves. This was marginally more interesting than most of his research.)
It snowed for much of the next two weeks. Anton helped his younger sisters build the world’s largest snowman in the garden, which they wrote to him took three weeks to melt fully.
Back at college for Hilary term, it seemed that he saw more of Henry than previously. They kept running into one another, and sat next to each other at supper a couple of times. Anton was profoundly conflicted every time. He really wanted to tell Henry that he was the one who’d lobbed the snowball that hit him while he was waiting blamelessly for his train. The urge to confess was almost impossible to resist. Henry might be annoyed, even these weeks afterwards, but at least Anton could claim credit for his marksmanship. At the same time, he really wanted to keep the secret, to prolong the star student’s bafflement.
In the end, he managed to say nothing. He hoped that for the next few months Henry would occasionally think of the incident and wonder what exactly had happened and why. And maybe even today, all these years later, after his long and distinguished academic career, after all those honours, he might still wonder who the phantom thrower was. Wonder why he had been marked out as his victim.
—————
Anton’s in his seventies now. School and even university are faint memories; dreams dreamed by someone else. It’s Christmas week and, amazingly, there was a considerable fall of snow last night. He’s walking the dog with his two sons-in-law. They’ve left his wife, daughters and grand-kids back at the house, watching The Snowman on TV. The snow in the park is wonderful, deep, crisp and drifted unevenly. Anton’s sent Joe and David back to retrieve the dog’s ball. He’s gone on ahead fifty yards or so. He’s standing behind an oak tree, out of sight, with a snowball in each hand. He’s been practising throwing with both hands at once, and has got pretty good at it. These middle-aged boys won’t see it coming until it’s too late, but they’re about to be ambushed.
© John Melmoth, 2026
For John Melmoth’s biography and novels go to the previous post under 26 February. His collections of short stories include Swimsuit Fandango (2022), Things Being Various (2023), and The Suburban Enchantress (2024). ‘Snowballs’ is included in his latest collection, A Certain Exhilaration (2026).
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
