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A Child's Christmas in Surrey
I stand
outside the oak door at the front of the house; my Wellingtons gripping the
moist pebbled concrete of the walk. Fingers of fog curl through the
wrought-iron fence and weave their gnarly knuckles around the clenched-up rose
bushes. It is a gloomy sight, one that seems to always persist this time of
year in Richmond on the outskirts of smog-bound London. I know there is a sun
up there desperately trying to force its rays through the shroud that envelops
me.
A voice penetrates the gloom.
“Peter, are you coming out?”
It’s Allen from across the road. I
am not too fond of Allen. He is unpredictable and can be mean at times. He is
dressed in a thick sweater and flannel pants. His hands are encased in woolen
mittens.
“Can’t,” I say.
“Come on, we can see what we can
find in the back alley.”
“My mom and grandma want me to help
them clean up for Christmas.”
“You’re such a scaredy cat. Peter
the scaredy cat, made to eat his fat.”
“Shut up!”
I know at this moment that I hate
Allen. I can see the headmistress stomping across the school yard, making a
bee-line toward me direct from the canteen where I know at the time I have left
a huge piece of fat lying on my plate. I am behind a small stone wall in a
small play area that opens up to the main playground and the headmistress is a
steam engine forging toward me with bits and pieces of my class mates hanging
onto her wake shouting, “He’s over here”. One of those bits is Allen betraying
me.
I
am identified and caught; hauled by one ear across the yard toward the canteen.
I smell the repugnant blended odors of fat, overheated mashed potatoes and
tapioca pudding. This is the daily lunchtime torture room where only a cold
half-pint carton of milk redeems the dining experience.
Once inside I am directed toward the
long table by the window looking out on the brick toilets in the centre of the
yard. Those toilets too have a memory of the day just before the bell when I
had needed to relieve myself. I’d never entered them before and once inside
mixed in among the older boys who were laughing and giggling at each other, I
was unable to go in and sit down to do the business. The walls were marked with
writing and the floor and walls were damp and foul. I didn’t do anything and on
hearing the bell had to enter the line to go inside. At that point I shit
myself and wore the results all afternoon; a silent smelly, unhappy boy who
when he finally escaped had ran crying home.
But I am now sitting staring at the
fat, cold and congealed on the side of my plate. The headmistress is standing
over me tapping her foot.
“Young man, you are going to eat
every piece of that meat.”
I want to say that it is not meat
but fat, but I am afraid, so I cut a piece, place it in my mouth and begin to
chew. I chew and chew and gag as the fat approaches my throat. I continue to
chew, chewing as if marking time and finally the headmistress leaves me there
alone to finish everything on my plate. I do not do this. I wait after chewing
and eventually swallowing the first piece. I wait until I am the only body in
the room. The white-coated ladies who serve us the food in the line are busy
behind their counter wiping things, so I pick up the piece of fat carefully and
hold it under the table. With one quick flick of my wrist I send the fat flying
far along beneath the table. I get up and walk to the counter and place my
empty plate down in front of one of the ladies. I expect her to inspect it, but
she is preoccupied and merely glances at it as I leave. I think of Allen and
know that I really do not like him.
“Shut
up!” I say again.
“Are
you stuck on the spot again?” Allen laughs.
More
memories flood into my agony. I am happy and it is spring. Puddles form
permanently at this time on the low curves of the asphalt in the schoolyard. I
run through them in parallel play splashing the water into the air with my
Wellington boots. The girls at the side in the senior class laugh and shout at
me as the muddy water curves up to meet their stockings and the hems of their
uniform. My legs are speckled with mud along with my knee-high socks. I run in
circles with an abandon until the headmistress has me in her claws and I am
rushed inside and bent across her oak chair, feeling the stinging lash of her
bamboo cane.
The spot is a tiny white dot about
the size of a tennis ball on the floor in the centre of the double entrance to
the school. After the lashing I am standing on this dot as further punishment;
standing straight as a board while the entire school in double file marches
into afternoon class. On the way past I am poked and pulled, kicked and pushed.
Many point and laugh and Allen passes and jabs me in the ribs. His mouth smirks
at me and I know once again that I do not like him.
“No, I just have to help get the
house ready or Father Christmas will not be coming. That’s what my grandma
says.”
I think of Father Christmas, the
gifts and the stocking filled with nuts and tangerines.
“He’s a fake. There is no Father
Christmas. That’s just for the little kids, you dope.”
“ He is not! How do you know? You’re
always so smart. You don’t know everything.”
Allen has come from his side of the
street and is now leaning on the wrought-iron fence enclosing my grandma’s rose
garden.
He’s a fake. Father Christmas is a
fake. He’s a fake. He’s a fake.”
Allen says this over and over again, chanting. I throw myself
forward, push the gate aside and I am on him, punching and beating at his face.
He fights back but my fury overwhelms him and I punch until his face is red and
smeared. From across the street Allen’s mother runs across the road and pulls
me from him. She shakes me gripping my arm. I squirm and kick her in the shin.
She lets go and I run inside. She picks Allen up and takes him across the
street. My heart is pounding. Father Christmas does exist. He is not a fake.
Tomorrow will be Christmas and the house will be filled with all my uncles and
aunties and my cousins and sometime after the Christmas dinner Father Christmas
will come and Allen if he looks out the front window of his house he will see
him.
From
behind me my mother says, “ What the devil have you been doing?” She is looking
at me and I realize that my clothes are dusty and dirt is clinging to my face.
I look at her with real fear.
“Nothing. Allen was throwing dirt at
me from across the road.”
“Not this again. Just last week you
scared poor Auntie Elsie with your fighting.”
I
remember once again. For weeks two boys sit on the roof of their father’s
garage. Each day they hurl stones and sand from the gutters as I pass. This day
without forethought I search for similar material to throw back at them. We
hurl sand and dirt back and forth until they decide to come down and finish off
the fight. It is two to one, so I punch the biggest boy in the face before he
has a chance to get too close and then I kick the other square below the knee.
Both fall to the ground and I run. I run and run down the street. In front of
the gate my mother is saying goodbye to Auntie Elsie, my favorite auntie who
took care of me when we lived in Scotland and I was only two. I don’t know this
from memory but remember being told this and know I love her since the bonding
was always there. Of course I’m a mess and look like a street urchin from a
Dickens’ novel. My mother is in shock and is doubly shocked as she grabs my ear
to pull me inside and a tiny spider crawls out of it and down my cheek.
I am drawn out of my memories by my mother’s voice.
“ Now get in the backyard and maybe
you can make yourself useful by sweeping the back step.”
I go through the kitchen and out
quickly leaving my mother and grandma polishing silverware and ironing the
tablecloth with a hot-cast-iron just out of the oven.
Alone in the back vegetable garden,
I feel the damp nip of the air and the thoughts of a make-believe Father
Christmas creeps into my mind. Would he come? He had to. But what if he didn’t
really exist and by knowing he didn’t exist, he wouldn’t come. I watch Cinders,
grandma’s black cat slink along the fence beside the coal bin. I avoid her,
knowing that she will eventually vomit up the bones and fur from a night of
hunting. Her habit is repulsive, so I move closer to the back of the garden. A
solitary snail slides across the somber, gray, cemented cracks between the
stones of the path. I watch him move as slowly as the approach of Christmas. I
wander into the tools shed at the rear of the garden where the loganberry
bushes climb tenaciously to the wall.I
feel trapped and oscillate back andforth about the belief in Father Christmas. Allen was just being
spiteful, or was he telling the truth. My cousins, who are arriving tomorrow
for Christmas dinner, will know and they will reinforce my hope that he will
come. To distract me from my fears I rummage through the sawdust on the floor of
the shed, searching for Vogue cigarette wrappers to fashion make-believe
sawdust cigarettes. I don’t light them but swagger around the shed with one in
my pocket and the other dangling on my lower lip.
Later bedtime does not bring me any
closer to an answer. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the adults at dinner so I
carry my burden of doubt into the damp, cold bedcovers.
The Christmas morning sun slides
silently into my rear window, creeps across the bedspread, over my shoulders
and blasts its light into my sleepy eyes. I jump out of bed and lean on the
windowsill. The yard is white with a thin wafer of snow. I take this for a good
sign. I scamper into my clothes and send my short stubby legs trundling down
the stairs, along the hall to the kitchen. My mother and my grandmother must
have been up at dawn as they have laid the white linen tablecloth over the
dark, oak dining room table. Everything is dressed for the occasion; the silver
is polished and set, the fire is crackling in the front room, the goose is
roasting in the oven. I can smell the Christmas pudding in the kitchen.
As I arrive, my mother turns.
“Your Christmas clothes are laid out in the closet.
You’re not going to be dressed like that. Now get back upstairs and get
weaving.”
I look at myself and roll my eyes.
Holidays are always so uncomfortable I think. Upstairs I struggle into a white
starched, scratchy shirt, gray flannels, bow tie, knee-high socks and a pair of
polished black shoes I always wear when we visit relatives for tea. I accept
the good with the bad and squirm and scratch uneasily down the stairs and into
the living room.
Soon aunties, uncles and cousins
filter in; aunties bundled up in great coats, carrying purses and aprons;
uncles squirming and scratching in their own starched shirts and choking ties;
cousins bobbing up and down; all shouting Happy Christmas. Being relegated to
the carpet along with other cousins, I strategically locate myself near Uncle
Norman, who on past afternoons I had waited for at the top of Bichester Road.
He would always ride me home across the bars of his bicycle as he returned from
work. Today, as he always did, he tickles me until I almost pee my pants and
the brown bas-relief designs on the wallpaper blur from the tears in my eyes.
I lie on my back exhausted, still
quietly searching my doubting soul for the answer to Father Christmas. I want
to ask Jimmy and Gillian, my closest cousins, but I am afraid of their answer.
I wait. I am convinced that Father Christmas has to come. I tell myself to be
patient, eat the Christmas goose, pull the crackers, struggle with the
assortment of vegetables, and delight in the traditional Christmas pudding that
always miraculously contained the exact number of sixpences and three-penny
pieces, as there were cousins.
Nearing the end of the meal, with
the boisterous rowdiness of conversational merriment in full swing, I watch my
father slink away from the table and disappear.I have not paid too much attention and have been caught up in the
goose and stuffing, the sixpence now in my pocket and the sweet sauce of the
Christmas pudding.
Sliding in among the table noise is
a faint jingle of bells, a scraping on the concrete outside the front
door.I question the sounds. A soft
rapping on the door transcends itself into a crescendo of knocking. We all jump
up; the little ones, wide-eyed with expectation. Surely he has arrived, I
think.
The door is opened to the crisp night air. True belief is
suspended in its fantasy. A mammoth sack rests on a miniature sleigh, pulled by
a shaggy black and white Scottish border collie with branches for antlers.
Father Christmas strides up the walk, grabs the sack, pets the reindeer on the
head and in one swoop of his hand bundles all the little folk, including me
under his free arm and carries us inside.
I know in that moment, even before I receive my gift, that Allen
is wrong. There is a Father Christmas; just as sure as I know that a dog can
become a reindeer, branches can turn into antlers, and a rusted battered sleigh
can carry the undaunted belief in Father Christmas, bells jingling across a
star-studded Surrey sky.
David Fraser
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