THIRTEEN DEGREES!

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20328, 11 June 1934, Page 8

THIRTEEN DEGREES!

The Plumbers Sang a Theme Song. HARDEST FROST YET. O, it was a lovely morning! The weather gods, who are extraordinary miracle workers, looked over their performances for the year, voted them mediocre or worse, and then set out to show what could be done. Result: 13.2 degrees of frost. A lazy overflow from the tank, dribbling quietly over the end of the house, became imbued overnight witn ideas of magnificence, and presented this morning an icicle of brilliant sheen and amazing proportions. As big as a young tree trunk, gnarled and twisted into all sorts of fantastic shapes, it was the high spot in one backyard where the icy hand had been at work during the hours of darkness showing just what it could do. The frost was so hard that the whole world seemed to be frozen to a stage of uncanny stillness. The thrush that usually makes the mornings clamorous just outside the bedroom window, huddled in the sunniest fork and brooded. The brilliant sparkle where the early sun employed every clinging icicle to divide its beams into displays of spectroscopic magnificence, meant nothing in the life of that sad songster. An ordinary brisk morning he could welcome with his accustomed serenade, but this . Well, he just huddled closer in that fork and waited for the sun to finish its colour display business and get on with the task of reviving half-frozen birds. The Songsters. But there were other birds, sans wings, sans feathers, sans song, who did sing. Everybody knows that a plumber can’t sing. He isn't built that way. But this morning, just to prove that the weather gods really are miracle workers, he did sing. It was of no use trying to talk to him on the telephone. “ Brr-r, brr-r, brr-r,” sang the plumber’s telephone. As music that was a wash-out; as a theme it was depressing. There was nothing else for it but to give the telephone up as a bad job and go and see him. He had just put down the telephone, for perhaps the hundredth time that morning, and was just on the final rising cadence of that “ Tw-ee-ct ” with which those who 44 Sing Like the Birdies Sing ” finish up their attempts. He was glad. It was a great morning, glorious weather, everything in the garden of frozen cisterns, fractured taps and burst water pipes was lovely. Bust! “Bust? You bet they’re bust: all over the city they’re bust; phone going all the time. Tum-tiddli-I-ti-ti-ti! ” And slam went some further lengths of pipes into the waiting van, followed by a miscellany of gadgets with which the plumbers amuse themselves in the burst water pipe season. From all parts of the city the telephone brought in the wailing S.O.S. of the householder, who had awakened to find his house without water, and then, when the thaw began, with far too much of it in unorthodox places. People of undoubted dignity and unimpeachable sobriety were performing odd dance steps all over the city. Moisture deposited on the roadways and footpaths before the frost set in had congealed t into traps of alarming smoothness, and a foot placed overconfidently on them played the owner false. Thus the walking stance, changed abruptly for a sitting posture, brought to a sudden termination many morning business abstractions, and introduced thoughtful citizens to a more acute (and often painful) awareness of their whereabouts. Suburbs Vindicated.

Clothes left on the line overnight were frozen stiff. Even as early as eight o’clock last night they had acquired the qualities of boards. Milk, left by early milkmen, was frozen. The white frost reared itself above the grass and the frozen ground till it formed a complete canopy. It was an entirely white world in which the icicles and the ice-covered puddles glistened in the early sunlight. The suburbs, which rate themselves as well above the city socially and in every other way to which an amenity can be attached, found balm for their souls this morning. For in the suburbs the sun shone generously and called to action. In the city a pall of smoky fog rolled through the streets and buried everything under a foul, soupy pall, beyond which the sun could be dimly discerned doing its valiant best. There was thus nothing cheery about the frost in the city, which remained a murky, frozen depressing place for the greater part of the forenoon. The weather in the city streets was of the type in which nobody could be cheerful, except, of course, the plumbers. But plumbers are a race apart, and, anyhow, most of them were loading up their vans to get out of the city into the suburbs. The Year’s Tally. Over the week-end the weather had been broken in most parts of the province, and on Saturday night there were snowfalls of varying intensitv, followed by a surprisingly mild frost of only 5.3 degrees on Sunday morning. To that stage the record of frosts so far this year had been as follows:

It was that list that the weather gods last night examined, condemned as altogether inadequate, and then embellished with the following impressive line: June 11 - 132 It was an ice effort!

February 19 March 14 Deg. May 13 May 26 May 27 May 28 May 29 May 30 May 31 June 10