35. February 11, 1963, 23 Fitzroy Road and 3 Abbey Road, London

It’s the nation’s coldest winter in more than 200 years. Much of the country is covered in snow from December until March. Everything freezes, from water pipes to monumental fountains to streams and rivers. Travel is disrupted, food stocks begin to run low, a regional newspaper reports with dismay that two swans have been found frozen to death on a nearby river. In the capital, early on a mid-February morning, a 30-year-old poet seals the door and windows in the kitchen of her rented house not against the cold but to keep in the gas that she knows will soon be escaping from the unlit oven into which she plans to place her head: she doesn’t want her two young children asleep in an upstairs bedroom to be hurt—additionally she seals the door to their room and leaves the window open. Not long before she has written a poem titled “Morning Song” that ends, “One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral/ In my Victorian nightgown./ Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square/ Whitens and swallows its dull stars./ And now you try/ Your handful of notes;/ The clear vowels rise like balloons.” On the very hour (10 a.m.) that her lifeless body is discovered by a nurse (sent by her doctor who has been treating her for depression), just under two miles away four young musicians enter a recording studio to lay down their first LP. Overseen by a producer, an engineer and various lab-coated technicians, they work almost nonstop throughout the day and into the night, recording 10 songs, which often require numerous takes and overdubs. It isn’t until 10:45 p.m., more than 12 hours after the sessions began, that they complete the final track. Although the quartet has traded off vocal chores, this ultimate number, which involves a great deal of musical shouting, is almost too much for the 23-year-old who is tasked with singing it. As he later recalls: “The last song nearly killed me. My voice wasn’t the same for a long time after; every time I swallowed it was like sandpaper. I was always bitterly ashamed of it, because I could sing it better than that; but now it doesn’t bother me. You can hear that I’m just a frantic guy doing his best.”

(Sylvia Plath, John Lennon)