The Big Freeze

Everyone in Longstanton knows the story of Tom Forbes. It began as a ghoulish news item in the South Cambridgeshire Recorder in December of 1962, fuelled village gossip for months afterwards and finally passed into local folklore. The Rev and Mrs D.P. Goodwin were scandalised when they heard that their beloved daughter, Caroline, had been accosted by Tom, an uncouth young farm labourer. (Accosted repeatedly in fact and, I might add, a very enthusiastic participant in the accosting.) The ever-respectable vicar forbade Caroline from seeing Tom but the young lovers were not deterred. Far from it. They became more determined than ever to meet and more skilful in hiding their liaisons from Caroline’s parents. When he felt particularly bold, Tom would hike across the fields by night from his home on the edge of Histon, climb the trellis under Caroline’s bedroom window and knock for admittance. The two would then enjoy a brief, silent but thrilling tryst before Tom made the return journey.

All was well until that fateful December night. It was cold: bitterly cold. Snow had fallen, partly melted, then frozen again, encrusting the whole landscape in treacherous ice. A knife-edged wind raked across the fields, raged at doors and windows and howled down chimneys. The prospect of a four mile walk across those godforsaken fields made Tom’s heart sink but he had not seen his sweetheart for a week and the ache of the separation made up his mind. He gathered the warmest clothes he owned – a threadbare jumper and his father’s old army greatcoat – and slipped the latch on the front door.

It was unimaginably cold. Every breath was a blade scraping at Tom’s throat. The trees looming over the lanes were not so much frozen as petrified. Tom had the uncanny idea that, if he took off his boot and knocked at one of the boughs, it would shatter like glass. The only mercy was that the ice had hardened the ploughed fields, so that Tom’s feet crunched across firm ground instead of sinking ankle-deep into the mud.

At last, Tom arrived at the vicarage. With his fingers and toes now completely numb, the climb up the trellis was perilous, but he was delighted to see Caroline at last. With growing excitement, Tom knocked at Caroline’s window. Silence answered. He knocked again. The window remained obstinately closed. Tom was half-frozen, clinging onto a rickety trellis in the pitch darkness and his lady love was blissfully unaware of his plight. Desperate, Tom pulled at the edge of the pane with his numb fingertips, pushed and rattled, and eventually pulled his fist into the sleeve of his coat and smashed the glass. Lifting the latch, the wide-eyed Tom half-climbed, half-fell into Caroline’s bedroom to find his worst fears realised. Caroline was nowhere to be found. Tom could not have known that the Rev Goodwin had quietly sent Caroline away to Norwich, to live under the watchful eye of her aunt and be free from the attentions of unsuitable young men. She was never seen in Longstanton again. Overcome by his exertions, by crushing disappointment and, above all, by the gnawing cold, Tom collapsed onto Caroline’s bed. In the morning, Mrs Goodwin discovered him: stone dead.

Or so the story goes. More than likely, it has been added to and exaggerated every time it has been retold. The truth might not be quite as romantic, but everyone at least agrees on the facts. Tom Forbes did indeed end up in the bed of Caroline Goodwin, frozen to death, on the morning of 19^th December 1962. For all everyone knew, that was the end of it. Until about a year later, anyway.

On 5^th January 1964, another resident of Longstanton passed away. It had been a punishingly cold night and, with Dorothy Woodrow’s history of chest complaints, it was unsurprising – although very sad – that her 79 year-old lungs had finally surrendered. The doctor who certified her death would have thought no more of it, except for the strange detail that Dorothy’s bedroom window had been found wide open, with the pane smashed. Dorothy’s daughter, who had been sleeping in the next room, reported that she had been woken in the night by a knocking noise but had thought no more of it and gone back to sleep. The police investigation was brief. No signs of a struggle, nothing missing from the house, no fingerprints. A strange incident to be sure, but nothing you could describe as a crime. The more fanciful residents of the village were agog, though. Frozen to death? In her bed? With the window flung open? Surely Tom Forbes had returned, still searching for Caroline.

Common sense prevailed. The echoes of Tom’s death were dismissed as pure coincidence and it was all forgotten by the end of the month. Forgotten for the next three years. On 16^th December 1967, Longstanton saw another strange death. Again, the deceased was found in his bed on a brutally cold morning and, again, the window of his room had been wrenched open and the glass smashed. But this death was far more of a shock than poor Dorothy’s. John Tanner was only 42 and apparently in good health. His distraught wife had been sleeping beside him and awoke that morning to find John rigid and ice-cold, despite the pile of quilts and blankets which covered them both. The doctor did his best to console her, then left her to break the news of their father’s passing to her four children.

Worse was to come. Barely a month later, another local was claimed, either by the cold or by Tom Forbes, depending on who you asked. This incident was the most tragic yet; little Helen Davenport was only seven. Helen’s mother had always fretted over her only child and had taken special care to make sure the little girl was warm and cosy, knowing that a sharp frost and sub-zero temperatures had been forecast. Alas, the thick blankets and the paraffin heater were to no avail. Helen went to sleep that night and never woke up. For all her mother’s frantic attempts to revive her, the girl remained as cold as ice, as lifeless as stone. The sharp east wind blasted through the bedroom and hammered the broken window against the sill.

The following years saw a string of deaths, all alike in their circumstances. A poor unfortunate was discovered in their bed, frozen to death, with their window wide open and the glass smashed. The victims had nothing in common: they varied in age, gender, health and prosperity. (A piece of dubious research by a local councillor, suggesting that the victims were all socialists, was soon discredited.) Indeed, the deaths spread beyond Longstanton to Oakington, Rampton and Girton. Most unsettling of all, there were several accounts on particularly cold nights of a strange, pale man in an overcoat, wandering the lanes and stumbling across the fields. If these stories had only come from giddy teenage girls or myopic pensioners, they would have been easy to dismiss, but after the police Chief Constable appeared in The Black Bull, ordered a large whiskey and swore blind he had just passed Tom Forbes in School Lane, the mood in the village quickly became more sombre.

A lurking dread now fell on Longstanton and for miles around on any icy night. Residents took to locking their windows, even nailing them shut, and plugging gaps with old sheets. Some families resorted to sleeping together in their living rooms, lest any one of them be singled out by the deadly, creeping freeze. Those who resolved to stay in their own beds would often be sent scurrying for the sofa by the noise – (Real or imagined? Who could say?) – of tapping at the window pane. Still the deaths continued. For the last sixty years, a sorry parade of locals have died in just the same way Tom Forbes did: in bed, the winter wind gusting through an open window, deathly, deathly, cold.

Many people scoff at all this. But I know it is Tom Forbes himself who wanders the fields and lanes on nights as cold and bitter as the one on which he died, still searching for his lost love. I know this because he is the one telling you this story. Can’t you hear me knocking? Open the window, Caroline. I’ve walked all the way here to see you. Please open the window. I’m cold.