PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH

 

People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather

CHRISTMAS is joy. It is also a cracker that does not crack containing a plastic toy without purpose; cheap wine in the dignity of a decanter; mistletoe over a doorway that waits in vain; the wrong tie in a bright package; a wrong word spoken in jest. Christmas is a comma in the long run of life. It is for families. Families are love. They are also tension: violin wires tight drawn upon which nerves squeek and scrape.

My mind is a jumble of Christmases, and some of the people who inhabit the recesses of recollection are misted by time, wraiths, possibly not a part of Christmas past at all, though they are congealed to the memories of Christmas. There was a man who visited my grandmother and who possessed such delicacy of behaviour that he never took a slice of bread by hand, but speared it with his fork. I imagine he thought the gentry did that. There was a fellow who never took his leave of us. He always "made tracks". He did not comprehend things. He "twigged" them. There was another who made every anecdote interminable. Talking about a tradesman coming to repair a leak, he would act out the performance. At the point in the story where the tradesman knocked at the door, he would arise himself, walk to the fireplace, knock ponderously, then survey us in silence before continuing. Every normal act was, therefore, a drama to him.

Christmas dinner bore testimony to the fruitfulness of the family: white blur of faces stretched endlessly along white table, grandmother presiding, back rigid as an icicle, pounding the table vigourously with her fist whenever any humour came her way which gained her approval. We used to get out her old gramophone, which had a huge horn speaker and a cylinder for records. Each recording began, "This is an Edison Beeeeeell record." Voices sounded as if their owners were in a far cellar being slowly strangled. She had George Formby - not the lad, who died, but the father. Silver Threads Among the Gold, I remember. And one about a drunk breaking his neck which gave me nightmares. I imagine I was given a teaspoonful of gin in cinder tea to cure those. Until antibiotics, doctors knew no other remedy for anything.

The women all tried each others' hats in the parlour and I averted th eyes when Auntie Florrie was feeding her babies. She always seemed to have a new one. Uncle Bob was a tall chap and used to pick up his diminutive wife and use her as a ball, throwing her to the ceiling and catching her, a pastime which amused him, alarmed her, and nonplussed us. The worst thing he ever said was "Fine morning." It was his form of blasphemy. I once saw him crack his head so hard on the old mantelpiece that I was sure the appendage would drop off. All he said was, "Fine morning", but he put a deal of feeling into it.

We were sometimes overcrowded. On one occasion he had to share a bed with Uncle Harry. The water bottle burst and they were swamped. Uncle Harry abandoned ship. Uncle Bob stuck his legs high in the air, his expression unchanged, observing, grandly, that he had been washed out of his bunk thousands of times -a reference to service in the Marines. A cyclist collided with him eventually and he died. It was a sad end, I thought, for a chap washed out of his bunk thousands of times.

From school we got a bag full of junk described as toys and Billy Metcalfe- a man of some note locally -gave us each a new penny. Mr. Snape was Father Christmas, as I recall, and one shouted up the chimney for presents.
Odd, I always thought, that Mr. Snape should be up there in dead of night.

A lot of faces are gone with the reaping of the generations. My grandmother and the long table. My grandfather, together with his pipes which were in hinged cases with velvet linings. The Edison Bell records. The oil painting of a relative who fought at Waterloo -done in profile because the militant gentleman had lost an eye in what, I always imagined, was a terribly fierce encounter. The bed with brass knobs that unscrewed.

But all are, in precious ways, what Christmas is about. Small voices singing, "Hark, the herald angels sing" , still sum up Christmas, the essence of it, the continuing family thread of it, where faces come and go at long tables, first young with awe, then mature with knowledge, then old with hard memory, but always topped by paper cap.
Warm and wretched time. Joyful and joyless time. In memory, the coal fire flares in the black-leaded grate while sounds from the kitchen herald the arrival of hot mince pies. While there is memory the kitchen does not grow cold, the sounds are still heard; and I do not know whether that is good or bad.

And the other side of it.....

The approach to Christmas is necessarily painful. Out of the nooks and crannies of our half-civilised nation come the hordes who are trained in barbarism. The little old lady is among the paratroops of this army. Unlike the sequences of Biblical lore, she does not ascend, but descends from hell with her trolley, her sharp elbows, her apparent inability to see anything around her. She has a highly-developed ability to put you in hospital while affecting innocence.

The little old lady was invented by the devil and the trolley was his implement of torture. It can be aimed, slid sideways into your path, used as a missile, or to block your way. Accompanied by elbows, it is the equivalent of an assault platoon. A group of a dozen old ladies in Fallujah would clear it of insurgents in five minutes. The rebels would be hopping about nursing their ribs or their shins and could be trussed up as they fought their agonies.

The little old lady boards trains. Seasoned travellers knowing the precise moment when to arise from their seats to be at the door first at their destination are frustrated by these dark, rocking little creatures who stumble ahead of them, and then wait at the door until the train has been stopped for a full three minutes before calling for assistance to alight. Those already on the platform scatter in all directions as the trolley is produced.

In stores, the little old lady will pretend that she did not see the queue. She will go to the head of it and push in. If challenged, she will apply an expression of bewilderment. Where is she? Who is she? The look expresses it all. The expression of others in the queue is rather different: Why is she? Men have never been known to win against little old ladies. Little old men are shoved aside like wheat. Which is why you find the little old ladies foraging in men's departments, dragging jackets from racks and leaving them strewn on the floor, or feeling the quality of socks they have no intention of buying.

Once at a till, legitimately or not, the little old lady will wait until told the price of whatever she is buying before producing her purse. She will then delve interminably in that purse seeking this and that coin before declaring that she will have to give a note. She gets her change and counts it slowly before placing it, piece by piece, in her purse.

Once outside, she will open her brolly and poke people's eyes out.

A friend says no woman under 6ft 6ins should be allowed to use a brolly.

Another says men were meant to keep out of shops, hence the invention of Eve. He could be right. Come to think of it, he is.

 

Geoffrey Mather © 2004

4 March, 2007