Christmas by Andrew Shephard

It’s coming up to Christmas, a drama whose cast and location has changed completely, several times, in my life. When you form an important relationship or get married, or have children, or lose a loved one, the form which Christmas will take can be a source of inner and outer conflict, a feeling that what is proposed is somehow not quite as Christmas should be.

Our idea of what Christmas should be is formed when we are very young, created from those first remembered gatherings of our own peculiar tribe, when food was unusually varied and plentiful, when bedtimes were not enforced, when games were played, when brightly coloured pop was drunk, and when the grown-ups were a lot less serious than usual.

This is me aged three and a half, on the first Christmas Day I can recall. I am in the back yard of my grandparents’ house in Mitcham, proudly showing my presents to the Brownie camera - a tricycle and a bus conductor’s outfit. My parents had lived with my grandparents when they were first married just after the second world war, my father still a soldier in uniform and only occasionally home from Africa. Three years before I was born they could afford to move to their own place, a maisonette between the A3 trunk road and the Southern Region railway line, and then, a few months before Christmas 1956, to a modern house with a smokeless coke boiler and a party telephone line in Morden.

We travelled back to Mitcham on a big red 118 bus, on Christmas Eve evening in the dark after my dad got home from work. I sat in the front seat so I could pretend to drive the bus. Arriving at the terraced house in Oakwood Avenue, the interior looked like a fairy grotto to the three-year-old me. Not only was there a tree in the front room, the whole downstairs was lit by strings of painted light bulbs linked with yards of twisted brown wire. When one bulb blew, the whole house was plunged into darkness until candles were lit, and Grandad would begin a painstaking round of every bulb to discover which one had failed. This activity occupied most of his Christmas.

You might think the small house would be crowded, but there was apparently plenty of space because we were joined by an aunt, two uncles, and a great uncle, a strange thin man who came and went like a vagrant. The gathering would be completed for ‘tea’ and party games by Mr and Mrs Gilbert from down the road. I have no idea where everyone slept – perhaps some relatives camped in the Gilberts’ spare bedroom? I remember I slept in a room upstairs full of beds on a hard and lumpy mattress covered in striped material.

Unaccustomed to so many people (my normal days were quiet, just me and my mum, my older sister having started school) I hid behind the curtains in the front room for much of the time. Peaking out, I could see grown-ups wearing paper hats and holding bottles of India pale ale, often gathered around a small table for games of cards and put-and-take. Big pennies clinked as they changed hands.

Enticed out from behind the curtains, I sat on Grandad’s knee while he provided the soundtrack to the evening, carefully lowering a steel needle onto brittle 78 rpm records. I loved watching the record labels with a dog listening to a gramophone go round and round. The music was by artists like Winifred Atwell, Ruby Murray, and Fats Domino. I couldn’t distinguish between old classics like Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women and the new modern sound of songs like Blueberry Hill and Green Door, a favourite of mine because it seemed to be about Mitcham and Oakwood Avenue where nearly every piece of wood was painted in the same shade of green. 

It is only recently that I realised how up-to-date Grandad was with his music. But if my sums are right the grizzled whiskery old man of my memory was only about fifty. I’ve enjoyed many wonderful Christmases since 1956, but that was when my Christmas die was cast. Since I was myself promoted to grandad a few years ago, I have been doing my best to create a similar mood with coloured lights, music and party games. I even have the green front door.

A Merry Christmas to all, whatever Christmas means to you.