The snow is thick on the ground, almost up to my knees in some places, and as I head up the path toward the front gate, with the flashlight gripped firmly in my hand, I realize that this is probably only the second or third time I’ve ever been out in the snow. The last time was so long ago that all I can really remember is desperately wanting to go back inside, but not being able to move because I was too scared of slipping in the snow and falling over. I’ve got the same sense of insecurity now — not trusting the ground beneath my feet — and I don’t know how to deal with it.

I simply don’t know how you’re supposed to walk in the snow.

At first, I try taking big, high steps, lifting my knees right up, but that leaves me balancing on one leg for too long, and it doesn’t feel very safe. So then I try walking without lifting my feet at all, shuffling along like a ski-less skier — sliding one foot forward, then the other, and the other — making my way through the snow rather than up and over it. And for a while, it seems to be working. It’s slow going, and it’s not easy — my legs are already starting to ache — but at least I feel relatively safe.

But then, just as I’m beginning to make some progress, a black snake whips up out of the snow and sinks its fangs into my leg.

I leap back in fear, clutching at the pain in my leg, and as I stagger away from the snake, my feet get caught in the snow, and I feel myself toppling over. As I hit the ground — back first and arms outstretched, like a snow angel — the black snake flops down beside me. I instinctively flinch away from it, raising my hand to protect my face, but the snake doesn’t do anything, it just lies there, perfectly still, utterly lifeless . . . and when I finally find the courage to shine my flashlight at it and take a good look, it’s immediately obvious that it’s not a snake. Of course it’s not a snake. Snakes don’t slither around in the snow, do they? It’s a length of black cable, that’s all it is. Just a length of black cable. And when I shine my flashlight up at the house, I can see where it came from. The junction thing (the thing that joins the telephone line to the house) is half hanging off the wall, and the telephone cable itself has been ripped off in the storm. The cable must have been buried in the snow, and when I slid my foot forward, the loose end must have sprung up out of the snow and whipped against my leg.

You’ve been bitten by a cable snake, Ella says, smiling.

If my teeth weren’t chattering so hard, I would have smiled with her.

I’m suddenly incredibly cold, I realize. Deep down inside, I’m freezing.

And I haven’t even reached the front gate yet.

The village road is just about wide enough for two cars, but it’s too narrow to have a sidewalk until it broadens out a bit when it reaches the village. Both sides of the road are lined with either thick hedges (of hawthorn and hazel and holly) or drystone walls — and sometimes both — and there are big old trees growing out of the hedgerows at irregular intervals all the way up to the village. In summer and spring, the hedges and trees form a lush green arch that’s so overgrown in some places that it turns the road into a tunnel, but now — in the depths of winter — the only greenery left is the strangle of ivy wrapped around tree trunks and the dark spikiness of holly. Everything else is barren and bare, like a world of gray-brown skeletons, their lifeless bones frosted with snow.

The fields that lie beyond the hedges on either side of the road are bleak and desolate too. Those on the left stretch out into the distance, eventually merging into the moors, and the fields on the right lead across to the edge of the valley and the woods down below.

The woods . . .

The woods.

They’re almost too terrifying to describe.

Imagine a steep-sided valley, a great trench of densely wooded land that follows the course of a fast-flowing river from the outskirts of town all the way up to the village and beyond, and then try to picture yourself clambering down one of the treacherous trails that wind their way down the precarious slope into the dark heart of the woods. There’s a silence down here, an eerie hush that magnifies the smallest sound, turning every snapped twig and rustle of leaves into something that’s coming to get you. The density of the woods seems to soak up and deaden any external noises too, so although the river’s nearby, the furious rush of the water sounds as if it’s a long way away . . . until, that is, you break out of the woods onto the river bank, and then all of a sudden the crashing roar of the river is so ear-splittingly loud that you can’t hear anything else at all.

Imagine that . . .

Imagine it.

I don’t want to, but I can’t help it.

My imagination of the woods and the river is just about all I’ve got. It’s based on a real experience — a barely remembered walk along the river with Mum and Shirley when I was two or three years old . . . still in a stroller . . . before Mum knew what was wrong with me, before she knew why I cried all the time. She thought it might help to take me for a gentle wander along the river, and if you start the walk from the National Trust pathway in town, which we did, it is just a gentle wander. But all I could see from my stroller, and all I’d come to remember, was the vast towering darkness of the wooded slopes, looming up into the sky like the walls of hell, and a furious roar of crashing water that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.

I cried and howled.

Mum took me home.

And I’ve had nightmares about the woods ever since.

The one good thing about my encounter with the cable snake is that the back of my pants are soaking wet and freezing cold from lying in the snow, which obviously isn’t good in itself, but it means that if I don’t keep moving, the icy dampness seeping through to my skin is just going to get worse and worse. Moving doesn’t make it that much better, but a bit better is a lot better than nothing at all.

So I get to my feet.

Brush myself down.

Take a deep breath . . .

And suck in a lungful of icy-cold air and snow.

And then, when I’ve finally stopped choking and coughing, I put my head down and get going.