A cold childhood casts a long shadow

Not a day has gone by this month when I haven’t muttered words of gratitude for our new accessible house. Building it was fraught and financially ruinous – but it is transformational in one primary regard: its warmth.

Not since I worked in an office, or since my long stay in hospital, have I been so effortlessly warm in winter. This defines luxury: the blissful ubiquity of underfloor heat, climbing towards 21C when we get up, declining as we go to bed. Like all spinal patients, I suffer badly from the cold. Here I find myself opened up physically: my shoulders back, my arms spread, I relax. No more hunching, tight upon myself, hampered by jumpers, always seeking radiators or stoves to hug.

Of course, I have lived well before, but never as warmly as this. Like many people with comfortable lives, I can reminisce fondly about the mock deprivation of childhood and icy student flats – the ice on the inside of the windows, the hot water bottle burns, the weight of eiderdowns.

How did we survive, we joke. Hardy stuff, us! We’re largely oblivious of those for whom the deprivation wasn’t mock – not a passing inconvenience but a pervasive blight on their early lives. People such as my husband, who grew up in a tenement in postwar Glasgow, and whose psyche is imprinted with the ache of inescapable cold.

A child is powerless to change their environment. My husband remembers flicking a switch in his head in order to cope. To warm up, he went outside to play, but his hand-me-down wellies were too big and chafed his bare legs, and his outdoor clothing was inadequate. At night he and his brother, who shared a bed, deliberately fought under the sheets to warm up. School he remembers as a refuge of warmth.

Seventy years on, we might assume that no child lives like that. But, sitting in warm rooms, our assumptions are dangerous. Government statistics from April 2025 estimate (though do not directly compare, owing to different methodology) that 11% of households in England were classed as fuel poor; that compares with 34% in Scotland, 14% in Wales and 24% in Northern Ireland. The drivers of this are low income, expensive energy and badly insulated houses, creating the core problem: an inability to meet basic heating needs. This in turn impacts health – especially that of children and elderly and vulnerable adults.

Electricity prices – as those struggling won’t need reminding – increase by a few pence this month. Every rise brings more suffering. Energy debt stands at £4.15bn. Last year the End Fuel Poverty Coalition cited University of York research suggesting almost 5m households – mostly those of pensioners, renters and families with children – spend more than 20% of income on energy, meaning deep fuel poverty.

The author Kit de Waal wrote movingly in the New Statesman last year about her cold childhood. The impact went beyond physical. It affected her sleep and learning, and made her sad, depressed, tense and isolated. The only time she relaxed, physically or mentally, was wrapped around a radiator in the local library. Given the lousy state of UK housing stock, and the lack of libraries, too many children still can’t escape the misery (which itself is often a euphemism for serious mental health conditions).

My husband’s adult behaviour was imprinted with hatred of cold. Pubs were warmer than home. Later in life, he stoked stoves to the point of exploding and ran the central heating all night. Now, finally, living in a tropical hothouse, he has stopped complaining. I wish others with cold pervading their bones could be as fortunate.

Photograph by Jason Hornblow/Alamy