Christmas Stories and Lost Worlds

There was a time when the kids were aged between six and sixteen years old when I seemed to be continually ferrying them to piano lessons, guitar lessons, taekwondo lessons, you name it. A fellow-parent, reminiscing on the corresponding period in her life remarked, ‘It seemed like I was living in the car.’

Towards the latter end of this period, number one son was learning music theory from a jazz guitarist called John Cherry, who lived, coincidentally, in Cherry Hinton. On Wednesday evenings I would drive him there, and while Bill had his lesson, I would do the crossword in the Robin Hood, a pub on the corner of Fulbourne Road and Queen Edith’s way. I’d just have a coke, I was driving, I hasten to add.

One Wednesday in early December 2009, I had dropped Bill off at Mr Cherry’s house and gone round to the Robin Hood. As I parked the car, I noticed a fluttering of snow. When I emerged from the Robin Hood an hour later, the snow was falling heavily and already there was an inch or two on the ground. I had mixed feelings about this: one, a slight unease about the prospect of getting the car the few miles back across Cambridge in this blizzard; and two, utter exhilaration that I was seeing real winter weather again, reminiscent of the winters of my childhood. In the fast-falling snow, the delightful 1920’s suburban building which the Robin Hood occupied looked like a traditional Christmas card.

Going very slowly and deliberately, I managed to get us safely home.

I was six years old in the Big Freeze of 1962-63, when so much of the UK froze to a halt. We lived in Kinglassie, a coalmining village in central Fife, and all I really recall of that winter was a lot of sledging and sliding, throwing snowballs, and I think nothing getting in and out of the village for days, perhaps weeks. Shortly after, we moved to Cowdenbeath, a bustling town of ten thousand souls. Around ten years later, I recall one cold January day walking across a frozen Loch Fitty, just to the west of the town.

But in 2009, it was more than twenty years since I had seen anything like real winter weather here in Cambridge, and I was reminded of GK Chesterton’s Father Brown referring to snow as White Magic.

 

I have already mentioned my long-standing work with colleagues in Sweden. Over the last thirty-five years, I have probably visited the Central Hospital, Falun, fifty or sixty times. Falun is a medium-sized town of around 40,000 population, in midland Sweden, around the same latitude as Shetland. When I first worked there in the mid-1980’s, the winters were extremely cold, with night temperatures of -25 or -30 Centigrade being common. In February 1987, I worked there for three weeks and there was more than a metre of snow on the ground. Thanks to the excellent insulation, the wooden houses had massive canopies of snow on their roofs, like the caps of toadstools. The place looked like Tir Na nOg, Fairyland.

I should say that Falun looks charming at the best of times, with painted wooden houses, shutters with heart-shaped spy-holes and so on. Gustaf Tenggren, who was responsible for much of the artwork in Disney’s Snow White, came from a similar area of Sweden, although a good distance south, and a considerable archive of his original artwork is preserved in the Dalarnas Museum in Falun. Looking at the architecture of Falun, you can see where a lot of the images came from.

Anyway, the colleagues in Falun and thereabouts tell me that those deep cold winters no longer happen in midland Sweden, the climate has changed radically.

                                            

Around ten years ago I had a dream in which I was back in the 1980’s, a young fellow living in West London and driving up to Scotland for Christmas. For some reason, after a rather bizarre car journey I ended up at the home of our adopted cousins the Whitesides (their dad and my dad were best friends) in East Kilbride, where my mum and dad were unusually spending Christmas. There was a thick layer of snow on the ground and Christmas trees with coloured lights in all the windows in the street. After chatting with my parents, and accepting a cigarette from my dad (I still smoked in this dream), gradually, strange noises intruded on the conversation and events. I eventually surfaced in bed in Cambridge, in around 2010. Mum had been dead for close to ten years, dad for more than twenty. Strangely, my chief feeling on finding myself back in the present was one of pleasure. It was absolutely lovely to see them both again.

A good Christmas, happy holidays to everyone everywhere, and a good New Year when it comes.