Great Meadow (5 page)

We walked slowly down the track just as the sheep came spilling over the ridge above us, all baaing and skittering with skinny legs. They started nibbling away at the place where the caravan had stood, and the big sheep dog lifted his leg on the rusty milk churn which was lying on
its side in the grass . . . and Mr Dick, the shepherd, waved to us and went on with his flock. It was as if no one ever had seen the witch, or known that her caravan had stood there. It was a rather sad feeling. So I just held the shell to my chest and we went on home.

The very first sign of all that it was about to be Christmas was when Lally took down the big mixing-bowl and she and our mother started to make the pudding. It took a long time because all the fruit had to be cut up into little bits, and my sister and I had to de-seed the sultanas that had been steeping in warm rum, which was fearfully boring even though we were allowed to eat a few, without making pigs of ourselves, as they said.

Then it all got lumped together, somehow, by our mother, who was very particular about that part, and everybody had to have a stir with the wooden spoon for luck. The best moment of all was when we scattered the lucky charms into the mixture. They were made of silver, because otherwise you had to wrap them in a titchy bit of paper and you could quite easily swallow them unknowing and they'd pass right through you, Lally said, and then you wouldn't have any luck in the New Year – which was what it was all about.

There was a thimble, and if you got that it meant you'd be a spinster, and a button, which if you found it meant that you'd be a bachelor, and a pig for greed, and a horse-shoe for extra luck and so on. And best of all two three-penny pieces which were real silver and boiled and polished so there weren't any germs or anything. And then we all stirred each once more.

It took ages and smelled lovely and we didn't see it again until Christmas Day, which was years away. Well, a
long time, because our mother always made the pudding in October, and it was kept in a dark place to get ripe.

That was the first sign. But it was so early that sometimes we forgot all about Christmas until the next sign, which was The Photograph.

Every year our father had a special half-page photograph taken somewhere very beautiful in the snow for the Christmas edition of
The Times
. Quite near the time he would be fussing about like anything about where there was a good fall of snow that year. Or even a really heavy hoar-frost would do, because the picture had to have snow, or anyway a very wintry feeling about it for Christmas. But the trouble was, it didn't always snow at that time, and he got into a terrible fuss and kept on telephoning people all over the British Isles asking them how their snow was. And quite often there wasn't. And that made him very jumpy indeed so he kept on sending his photographers everywhere just to sit and wait until something happened. And they got jolly fed up, they said, sitting about in the Pennines or up in the Shetlands or down in Land's End, because nothing much ever happened, and if it did it wasn't enough.

But sometimes, if we were down at the cottage for a weekend, and it suddenly got very frosty, he'd rush down to the village and telephone The Office to get someone down quick sharp before it all went away and the weather changed.

We were sometimes allowed to go out with him when this happened, which wasn't very often because Sussex was too mild, he said, and we usually went with a very nice photographer we called Uncle Bill. Of course, he wasn't
really an uncle, not kith and kin or anything, but we had known him for ever and ever – anyway, long before my sister was born even – and we liked him very much and he was called Mr Warhurst. Well, such a fussing. We went off in the O.M. with cameras and tripods and maps and things, and climbed hills, stamped through woods and went to quite far places like Herstmonceux, where there was a beautiful castle, or Ashdown Forest, or Rye. Wherever we found ‘somewhere suitable' we'd stop and have a terrific picnic with Thermos flasks of hot tea or soup, sausage rolls, meat pies, or cold chicken and hard boiled eggs, and wait for the light to be right. We always had to do this. It never seemed to be just right when we got there. And all the time we were eating or drinking they were looking at the sky through little glass things and shouting numbers at each other and looking for the cloud to be just exactly right – there had to be clouds too, that was very important, because you just had to have them with the sun slanting through. The readers liked that, my father said, especially if they were miles away in places like Africa or India or Ceylon or somewhere very far, and in all the heat, and among all the black men, the photograph would remind them of England.

When the light was exactly right there was a terrific rushing about and sometimes my sister and I had to go and actually be in the picture to give it ‘interest'. Only, never our faces or fronts, just our backs, and we'd have to drag a big log about, or perhaps carry a heavy bundle of twigs, through the frost or the snow. It was really quite exciting in a way. Anyway, it was for them. My sister got
a bit fed up dragging bits of wood about and got cold, and started moaning. I got a bit tired with it all too, but remembered the poor people being terribly hot in Africa or India and in a way that cheered me up. And it cheered us both up to remember that The Photograph was the second sign, which was rather good because it reminded us, you see, of the first sign, the pudding. And that meant Christmas was on its way. Which was even better.

Of course, about the pudding time we started to save up for presents, which was a bit boring to begin with, but quite nice when you got to the shopping part. I mean, it was boring to have to put half your pocket money – and we only got fourpence each a week – into an empty Vim tin to buy other people things. But it had to be done, so we did it. It was quite a good feeling when the tin got heavier and you began to think what you'd buy everyone. The trouble was that you couldn't buy people what
you
wanted. You had to buy them what
they
wanted. And Lally, or our mother, was very particular about that when we came to the shopping part. I didn't know
why
our father wouldn't have liked a very pretty glass goldfish in a little bowl, with waterlilies painted round it, but our mother said he'd detest it, and much prefer a pair of dull old socks. So I just let them choose in the end. You really couldn't fight them. My sister wanted to buy a rather nice little clockwork bird for Lally, which wound up and went rushing about pecking things, but she had to get her a stupid bottle of bath salts in the end. It wasn't worth fighting, you see. Nothing we really liked was ‘suitable', they said.

Of course the main thing about Christmas was the presents. We knew it was about the day that Jesus was born and everything, and the presents were supposed to be the ones the kings all brought to the manger that time, but we got a bit muddly about Santa Claus, who seemed quite different from holy things. And it was quite hard to understand. Anyway, it didn't matter much because I knew, ages ago, it wasn't Santa Claus but our father, because I watched one night and saw him creep in and put the stockings at the end of our bed. And years ago, when we were really quite small, Lally took us for the day to Mrs Jane's at Walnut Cottage and, as a special treat, we went to Bentalls in Kingston to see the Goblins' Grotto and Father Christmas. It was a bit worrying because we had seen him at Selfridge's the week before -only, he was at the North Pole there. We stood in a long line waiting to have a word with him, and when it was my sister's turn she went rather red in the face, and he put her on his knee and was being quite decent to her when she suddenly hit him and screamed and screamed so that Lally and Mrs Jane had to rush and take her away. She sobbed and snivelled all the way through the lampshade department and even through the corset one. It was awful really. And people kept turning round.

We went down in the lift and when we got to soft furnishings Lally made us sit down, dried my sister's eyes and asked what on earth was all the fuss about.

‘He had terrible red eyes!' said my sister.

‘Nonsense!' said Lally. ‘Red eyes indeed.'

‘Red . . .' she wailed. ‘And awful long whiskers and he
made rumbling noises at me and said if I hadn't been a good child in the year he'd come down the chimney and sort me out.'

It took a long time to get her all right, and they only did it at the ABC tea shop when Lally let her have first choose of the cakes. So then she shut up. But we never mentioned Santa Claus again really. And every time she saw one, and there seemed to be hundreds everywhere, she grabbed Lally's hand and hid herself in her skirts. She was very relieved that we had a gas fire in the nursery so he couldn't get down the chimney anyway.

So we knew that presents really came from family and from kind people we knew.

Because we hadn't much kith and kin of our own, we had to invent uncles and aunts, which was quite good in a way because you only had the ones you really liked as uncle or aunt. The rest you just called Mr or Mrs and they didn't count.

Of course, we did have some real kith and kin up in Scotland, who belonged to our mother, but we didn't see them often because they lived so far away in the cold and mists, and although they were quite nice, I suppose, they weren't a bit like us. The one bad mark against them was the presents they sent, and they were awful. I mean, you always knew exactly what the present was long before you even opened it.

Flat.

Just flat.

No lovely bumps and lumps and poky bits sticking through the paper which made it really exciting, just flat.

So you just knew it was a box of Edinburgh rock or a pair of gloves, or a jigsaw puzzle, or worse still, a book. I mean, whoever sent anyone a book for Christmas? You'd have to read it before you could write the Thank You Letter and you never read a book at holidays. Only at school. Forced.

There was no fun in books or gloves or Edinburgh rock, even though the rock was quite nice, especially the cinnamon bits, but sweets aren't very interesting even in tartan boxes with pictures of Prince's Street on the back. Boring. And gloves. Whoever wants gloves when you've got your own anyway?

So we just knew by the
flatness
what we were in for and left them to the last to open, but we still had to write Thank Yous. Lally kept all the labels and wrote on them saying who they were from and what they had been, because things did get into a bit of a mess on Christmas morning round the tree. So she wrote ‘Rock' or ‘Book (
Kidnapped
)' or ‘Gloves' or ‘Long, knitted stockings' to help out at the thanking time.

Long, knitted stockings. Honestly . . .

But some people sent marvellous presents, like another borrowed aunt. She was French, and a famous actress, and we called her Aunt Yvonne and she sent the best presents ever. All bumps and knobs and poky things sticking about. And huge. Once I got a sort of hobby horse with a head and a real grey and white speckly mane, and once a butcher's shop with a butcher, sides of meat, sausages in long pink rows. All in plaster of course, but it was a lovely present. And she always remembered Lally as well and sent her soap, which was very interesting because each
piece had a picture of a different dog or a horse on it, and they never wore off, even when the soap got to a little thin sliver of a thing. It was called RSPCA soap, because that's what it had on the box, which made it sound pretty important, and our mother said that Aunt Yvonne had probably bought it at one of the charity bazaars she always had to open, but it was a very kind thought anyway. And Lally said she had enough soap to open a laundry. But she was quite pleased, you could tell.

We always had Christmas together, either at the London house, which was all right but not quite such fun, or the cottage, which was the very best. But once, on a dreadful occasion, we had to go and have it with some real kith and kin that my father had found who belonged to him. It was a bit of a shock, I can tell you. They were what he called his Second Cousins Twice Removed or something. But we still had to go. And even if it sounded quite interesting it wasn't. It was dreadful.

Aunt – well, we had to call her Aunt of course, because even if she was Twice Removed and we didn't like her all that much at first sight she was ‘blood' or something – anyway, Aunt Phyllis was terrible. I mean she was quite nice but just didn't understand children, our mother said. And she was married to a man called Digby, who was just as bad but worse really, because he never spoke to us at all except to say ‘Herrumph' or ‘Now, I'm quite sure you'd like to go for a splendid health-giving walk over our common. Lots of fascinating things to see, you know.' We didn't want to go at all because it was freezing outside, and there wasn't anything to see except awful old dead heather and big, gloomy pine trees. They lived in a most
peculiar house. Our mother said they designed it themselves and it was very modern and advanced. It was jolly uncomfortable: huge glass windows and no fireplace and all the chairs were made of shiny metal, and even the dining-table was made of thick glass and silvery iron stuff.

I ask you . . .

And they didn't even have a Christmas tree because Uncle (we had to call
him
Uncle too) Digby had asthma or something, and Aunt Phyllis said they were very dangerous and shed their needles everywhere and made a mess, and in any case it was all nonsense because it was invented by the Hun. Our mother said that was her name for the Germans.

So we just had our presents, which our parents had brought with them in the car, up in our bedroom. That was pretty horrible too because it had bunks like on a ship, and my sister had the lower one and I had to climb an iron ladder to get into mine, and she was under me and was terrified all night that I would want to do a pee and wouldn't bother to go: and then where would she be?