Christmas memories

Fats Waller had it right. My feet’s too big. It’s a wonder I wasn’t selected as ‘person in the class least likely to walk across a room without tripping over a chair leg.’

They aren’t, in fact, too big. But they dish out to the side, and this, coupled with my disturbingly sketchy proprioception, leads to regular unscheduled collisions with low objects and the induction of the expression ‘Dad’s Feet’ into the family lexicon.

This mildest of disabilities seems to have got worse in the last few years, just another reminder of the slow grip exerted by ageing; but it’s always been there, and Christmas is as good a time as any to remind me of it, my flappy feet playing a crucial role in the second most dramatic Christmas Eve of my life.

December 24th 1974. A house somewhere in Oxfordshire. Two bored brothers, desperate for it to be tomorrow, niggling in the usual way, energy and excitement to burn. There is mild fightiness in the air – nothing drastic, but fuelled by the excitement of the season.

Imagine a kitchen, with a flagstone floor. The flags are slightly uneven, and constitute (SPOILER ALERT) a minor trip hazard. The mention of the unevenness of the flagstones at this point is an example of the literary technique called ‘foreshadowing’ – was it not Chekhov who said ‘if you write about an uneven flagstone in an early paragraph of your blog post, you must make sure someone trips over it, ooh let’s say five paragraphs later’?

The kitchen has all the things you might expect in a kitchen, but we zoom in on the squat, crimson shape lurking on the far side, beyond the table: it is an anthracite-burning boiler, it is low and sturdy, and it is absolutely the perfect shape and size for small boys to sit on and warm their backsides.

We fight over everything, but the right to sit on the boiler is the fight du jour.

I don’t remember which of us decided he was bored of watching telly and made the first move, but no sooner had he done so than the other was after him.

I was ahead as we raced down the hall; Step – four years older, faster, stronger – was ahead at the kitchen door; as we tumbled through it my superior wriggling abilities and relative lack of inches enabled me to sneak through on the rails. Adrenaline, laughter, boyish exuberance bubbling over.

I don’t remember the impact, nor really the immediate aftermath. There will, no doubt, have been screaming of some kind. And blood. Quite a lot of blood.

Remember the uneven flagstone? Remember my flappy feet? Chekhov would be proud of me.

It’s the merest chance that I still have sight in my left eye. The table was an old farmhouse kitchen table with rounded corners. A sharper table corner, or a centimetre to the right…

They butterflied it with two huge bits of plaster. Part of me wanted the drama of stitches, but without the agony attached. The butterflying suited me just fine.

And then, I suppose, Christmas went on as usual, but with the added bonus of me milking my injury for all it was worth with everyone who crossed our threshold.

While that one is frighteningly specific, most of my childhood Christmas memories form a generic cloud (we gloss over the terrible Stereo Wire Cutting Incident of 1980 – there’s a trauma none of us wants to relive).

It was a time of warmth and togetherness,

clementines by the skipload

Terry’s Chocolate Orange for breakfast

paper chains looped from one corner of the room to another, then not taken down properly, so a scrag end would be noticed some time around Easter

circling the programmes in the Radio Times and then not watching them

The Wizard of Oz on the telly

the actual pain of Christmas not being here yet

icing the cake and making the icing twice as thick as the marzipan (ack bleurgh yeurk) and scraping out the bowl with a rubber spatula, then pressing the little silver balls into the icing with a satisfying squidge and putting a cluster of them together and hoping I’d get that slice

sneaking into the spare room, because I knew where my mum had hidden the presents, but stupidly not realising that the squeaky floorboards were directly above her office where she sat monitoring my every move

the joy of descants in carols

being allowed to stay up to watch a Marx Brothers movie (why did they screenthem at midnight?) then getting bored five minutes in and going to bed

the time the milkman brought the wrong order on Christmas Eve and he knew it as well and by the time my mum had got to the back door he’d scarpered and then I heard a really jolly rude word for the first time in my life

carol singing round the village on Christmas Eve, and knowing in advance where we’d be invited in for mince pies and a glass of mulled wine, and where we’d be grudgingly tolerated for three grunted verses of The First Nowell while they silently begged us to stop

gathering ivy for the mantelpiece display and glueing glitter to the leaves

the year I learned properly about Santa Claus and we heckled our parents from inside our bedrooms as they filled our stockings, which that year were plastic bags, the stockings long having outlived their useful lives because of size

having to wait for our parents to get back from church on Christmas morning before we could open the presents

Christmas tree needles all over the place

a sixpence and trinkets in the Christmas pudding and eating it really carefully because I was scared of choking

the annual appearance of walnuts and dates

being desperate desperate desperate for it to snow on Christmas Day but it never snowing

just a bit more brandy butter oh no that’s too much so maybe a bit more Christmas pud oh no that’s too much so maybe a bit more brandy butter

Christmas crackers with indoor fireworks

leftover bread sauce

the smug feeling after Christmas was over, because the Armenian side of the family celebrated on January 6th so I’d get more presents

And then suddenly I was grown up, in name at least, and Christmas was different – the warmth still there, but the cosy cocoon of childhood replaced by a growing sense of the troubles and complications of the world, of adulthood, of life.

And one year, thirteen years after the banging-my-head-on-the-kitchen-table incident, I’d come back from London to be with my mother, and as I slept I heard the phone ring and ring and ring and by the time it stopped I was awake and knew it wasn’t in my dreams and that it was the hospital and that they wouldn’t have rung at 7.30 on Christmas Eve morning if it hadn’t been the worst news, and we went to the hospital and bought The Times and my mum did three clues in the crossword and the nice doctor came in and told us and that was that and I called my brother and told him to come back and we stopped for petrol and cigarettes on the way home and none of us really knew what to do but it was Christmas so we carried on.

That was thirty years ago.

It took some time for Christmas to become a happy place again, but time heals, and cycles repeat, and now, once again, we have clementines by the skipload and Terry’s chocolate orange for breakfast.

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