Jonathan Brown: Daffodils might be in short supply. But my children are everywhere

Home And Away

TS Eliot was wrong. It is not April that is the cruellest month, it is March. And its fiendishness is nothing to do with lilacs out of the dead land mixing memory and desire. The more prosaic truth is that the travails of March, as any parent of young children will know, are down to the simple matter of sleep.

Here in Yorkshire, where some parts of the county have been covered in forgetful snow for the best part of three months, the slow reawakening of the life-force should be a time for joy. For every child that likes to play in the snow I reckon there are a dozen who prefer to stay in the warm inside and avoid the slushy freezing stuff as best they can. Our children certainly fit the latter category. The result is a growing sense of cabin fever brought on by too many open fires and the TV permanently tuned to CBeebies. So why not be happy that winter is finally over?

The reason is that March brings with it not just crocuses, snowdrops and – in normal years at least – daffodils but also very light early mornings. The hour that springs forward this weekend has been a long time coming, and for some weeks now parents have been caught in an energy-sapping hiatus in which some ungodly five o'clock starts have been endured. One feels like a member of Eliot's undead streaming across London Bridge. To make matters worse our children have chosen this moment to give up watching television. I know it should be a source of unbridled middle-class joy that they prefer to seek out the simple pleasures of books and games but how we yearn for the pacifying power of Chuggington or Numberjacks.

As the air has warmed, so the children have begun to hang around outside my garden office. And this tends to happen after they have just returned from school, in volubly high spirits, and I am wrestling with a deadline. Such is the lot of the home worker – always on call to family and friends, always regarded as shirking by bosses.

One of the joys of living in Yorkshire is that there is so much to do, and with the weather improving the prospect of family fun day outs stretches tantalisingly into the summer. Everyone else must be having the same idea because Whitby this weekend was heaving. The crowds sat around eating fish and chips in the sunshine as the malevolent seagulls gathered and occasionally led raids on unsuspecting al-fresco diners. And on the hill, looming in all its derelict gothic splendour was Whitby Abbey.

I was toying with the idea of regaling my five-year-old with an edited version of the story of Dracula but thought better of it after remembering the nightmares and terrors induced when she watched Peter Pan. Luckily a kindly old couple decided to tell her for us – about how the creepy old vampire Count was washed up on the shore in a storm and went around swooping into people's homes at night and biting the necks of pretty ladies.

My daughter says she now wants to read Dracula after we have finished The Enchanted Wood though I think not. There are some astonishing stories around our home city of York, many of which are not suitable for children because they are true.

This week, for example, historians are meeting at the local university to discuss the events that led to the pogroms and mass suicide of the city's Jews at Clifford's Tower in the centre of York on 16 March 1190.

The daffodils are just opening at the site of the Tower and it is fitting to remember at this time of year the sudden explosion of anti-Semitism that occurred around Richard I's Coronation 800 years ago. As unrest grew, York's Jews, thought to have numbered around 150, took refuge in the tower, believing they would be safe. But as disorder spilled over into violence, the elders decided to set fire to the keep and cut their children's throats. Those who survived were murdered by the crowd and their remains interred in a Jewish cemetery that is now a Sainsbury's car park.

It is a gruesome story but an important one that is all too easily overlooked amid the gift shops, tea rooms and the cobbled streets of the city where memory and desire will jostle for the attention of the tourist hordes this summer.