Free The Rain Before it Falls by Jonathan Coe

beneath a white, snow-heavy sky, you have the distant outline of the pavilion. This building loomed large in my youth: it was here that dances were held – out on the terrace in the summer, if the weather was kind – and these rather terrifying but exhilarating events used to form the backbone of what little I had in the way of a social life. It was a stylish black and white building, with high arches framing its tall French windows. You can see three of them in this picture: the remainder are obscured by trees, as is the van selling mugs of hot chocolate which was permanently stationed beside the pavilion, and the small twin bandstands which stood on the lawn beneath the terrace. It’s a shame those aren’t in the photograph. They would have looked festive and eccentric in the snow.
    In front of the pavilion, flanking it on either side, we can see two rows of grand, domineering horse chestnut trees. The four trees in each row blur together, their branches thick and tightly interlocking, so that it looks as though there are just two of them, two massive domes made up of bonelike intersections, which watch over the pool like bloated sentries, keeping silent guard. Normally, they would have thrown huge, equally impressive reflections on to the pool’s silvery surface, but it has frozen over today, and the ice reflects nothing: it is coarse and grainy, gleaming white streaked with grey where the shadows fall, and there are thin, reedy plants pushing their way through it in occasional clumps. This is where we can see the third ‘layer’ of the picture – the skating figures. Some of them are caught in motion, just a blur passing in front of the camera; others are captured in moments of strange, contorted stillness: arms splayed out, struggling for balance, knees raised awkwardly in the air. One man is keeping his left hand jammed into his pocket, while with the other arm he seems to be pointing at the ice with an outstretched finger, as if he has just spotted some sinister apparition beneath its surface. Two young women are just standing together, talking on the ice, while a teenage boy looks to be on the point of crashing into them. He is wearing short trousers, somewhat surprisingly. They all look rather poignant like this, the way the photograph has reduced them to an unnatural stillness, just when they are doing something as dynamic and joyful as ice-skating – rather like those figures embalmed in the molten lava at Pompeii, caught at the moment of their last struggle before death. How morbid my thoughts seem to be growing, recently. Most of the men are wearing flat caps – this is one of the things that dates the photograph – and that peculiar style of trouser that was so popular then, where the waistband seems to come up incredibly high, halfway up their chests by the looks of it. Rather ludicrous, I suppose, to modern eyes. You can see this because not all of them have coats on, which leads me to remember that, in spite of the frozen pond, it was quite a sunny afternoon. Beatrix and I were a little overdressed, it seems. Soon after this, perhaps, was when the thaw set in. Of course the winter of 1944–1945 was famously horrible. The blackout had ended by now, I seem to remember, and was replaced by what was known as the ‘dim-out’ instead. However, not only was the weather foul – I remember days and days of particularly thick and filthy fog, especially at dusk, which the cloudy light from the streetlamps could barely break through – but the news from abroad was dispiriting as well. The Germans had developed a major counterattack against the American First Army, and our hopes that the war might be over before Christmas were soon dashed. Although I still did not really take in the full ramifications of these things (I was a self-absorbed girl, capable of, but not interested in, understanding the events that were unfolding around me in the wider world, and I suppose I have stayed that way ever since)