Further Titles in the Series
by Andrew C. Rouse

Level A2

Mr Codie of Scotland Yard

The British Pub

The Ride of Johnny Ringo

Level B1

My Christmases

Tales from Watchet

Small Ads

Level B2

The English Village

For all levels

with Audrey V. Rouse

Eating Around Britain

Further Titles in the Series

Level A2

István Fekete Thorn Castle

(Tüskevár)

Hungarian Folk Tales

(Magyar népmesék)

Hungarian Legends

(Magyar mondák)

Level B1

Frigyes Karinthy Please, Sir

(Tanár úr kérem)

László L. Lőrincz The Shame of the Great Dome

(A Nagy Kupola szégyene)

Ferenc Molnár The Paul Street Boys

(A Pál utcai fiúk)

Level B1

István Csukás Bowler Hat and Red Nose

(Keménykalap és krumpliorr)

Frigyes Karinthy A Journey Round My Skull

(Utazás a koponyám körül)

Géza Ottlik School at the Frontier

(Iskola a határon)

My Christmases

B1 (1700 headwords)

Written by ANDREW C. ROUSE

Illustrated by RONTÓ LILI

ISBN 978 963 05 9315 1

ISSN 2062-6150

Published by Akadémiai Kiadó,

member of the

Association of Hungarian Publishers and Booksellers

founded in 1795.

1117 Budapest, Prielle Kornélia u. 21–35.

www.akademiaikiado.hu

First edition: 2012

© ANDREW C. ROUSE, 2012

© AKADÉMIAI KIADÓ, 2012

Responsible for publication: Director of Akadémiai Kiadó

Responsible for editing: POMÁZI GYÖNGYI

Managing Editor: KÁCSOR LÓRÁNT

Page-Setting: LACZKÓ LÁSZLÓ

Cover Design: SÜTŐ RÓBERT

Technical Editor: KISS ZSUZSA

Print: Akadémiai Nyomda

Managing Director: UJVÁROSI LAJOS

Copyrights are the sole property of the copyright owners

listed above. Any copying, distributing and reproducing in any form

(electronically, mechanically, by print or photography)

without prior permission of all copyright owners is prohibited.

Printed in Hungary

This book is dedicated to Jeannie Grant,
who holds the all-time world record
for the shortest female Father Christmas!

My Christmases

About This Book

One of the biggest problems of teachers of foreign languages is that they are supposed to know everything about the languages and the native speakers of those languages – their humour, their diet, their history and literature, their habits and customs. Just pick up any book about the British, and it will have a chapter that begins something like this: “At Christmas in England the people…”

I have read quite a lot of these descriptions of a ‘typical’ English Christmas, but somehow they never brought together the Christmas that I have in my head; the Christmases I spent with my family, friends and colleagues in England. This book is different from the sort of thing that people write when they try to describe a ‘typical’ Christmas. They must take away all the things about Christmas that are not the same for everyone. I have not done this; some things in this book are quite special, but all the Christmases are real ones and the people real people. The first part is about childhood Christmas in a small market town. The second is a teenage Christmas in London. And the third is a professional Christmas.

The Family photos are of the 1963 Rouse Christmas. My father took them, which is why he isn’t in them!

Childhood Christmas, West Dorset

If you look at the map of England, and find the county of Dorset, down in the South West, you will see the town of Bridport just a little way up the River Brit from the English Channel. Bridport is a small market town of seven or eight thousand inhabitants which, in another part of England, would have no importance; but in West Dorset, which has no large towns at all, it is a centre for all the many tiny villages and farms around it.

The town has two shopping streets, which divide it like a letter ‘T’ with the old Town Hall at the meeting-point. The top, horizontal part of the T is the longer of the two streets, and in actual fact it is two streets which join together; West St. and East St. The other street, naturally, is South St., These streets are very wide, which shows that the town has always been a market town – there had to be enough room for all the horses and carts, animals and food produce that the farmers brought into town to sell. There is still a market every Wednesday and Saturday, but the animals have gone, and instead you can buy furniture, cheap plastic toys and pot plants, as well as vegetables and dairy products.

When the Rouse family moved to Bridport in the early sixties, the town was famous for two things. It was the largest rope-making centre in the world, and it had more pubs per inhabitant than any other English town. The Japanese now have a larger rope-making centre, but it is a modern factory. Bridport’s ropes came from rope-makers’ homes in the town’s interesting back streets, called Rope Walks. The rope-makers were fishermen’s wives, who lived in terraced houses with long, narrow yards. You can still see hooks in the walls of some of these houses, where the ropes began. Most of the work was net-making, and the net-makers started at the house end, making their way down the yard, twisting and turning the rope like an enormous piece of knitting. Until the British abolished hanging, the Gundry family, who are still the owners of the rope industry, had a royal monopoly on making the hangman’s rope.

The number of pubs has gone down, too, for the harbour of nearby West Bay, at the mouth of the River Brit, is too small for large, modern ships. The names of the pubs showed Bridport’s close contact with the sea; The Sailor’s Arms, The Shipwrecked Mariner, The Star, and even The Tiger all tell of the sailor’s life.

Bridport is a family town. Nearly all the shops are family businesses, some of them many generations old. The building firm, the Gundry rope factory, the coal merchant, the dairy, the bakeries all belong, or used to belong, to local families. It is a town where everybody knows everybody else, and where the people of the town celebrate their festivals as a community. And, of all the festivals in the year, Christmas is the biggest and most universally celebrated.

Christmas is big business, and every year the first signs of the festival appear earlier and earlier. Not so many years ago, the council of an English seaside town produced a Father Christmas visit for the sunbathing holidaymakers on the beach. But over the past few decades, Christmas has started some days after November 5th, Guy Fawkes Night. It begins with television commercials and Christmas presents in shop windows, but a person really begins to feel the atmosphere of Christmas when the Christmas trees arrive in the middle of November. Unlike many continental countries, the British dress their trees several weeks before Christmas itself. First, the shop owners place trees, either in the windows, or very often above the shop sign outside the building, sticking out like a many-coloured, sparkling flag pole.

In Bridport the street was full of trees by the beginning of December, and at night, when their lights went on, it was a magical feeling for a small boy to walk down that twinkling column of electric rainbow colour. It is nearly forty-five years since we moved to Bridport, and thirty-five since we left the town to go and live in the capital, but I can still remember clearly how pretty the whole town was at this time.

At about the same time the music teachers of the schools were preparing the children for Carol Concerts, with all the traditional carols and one or two new ones, and the schoolboys, each year since those teachers can remember, were singing their own versions to them.

Instead of

While shepherds watched their flocks by night,

All seated on the ground,

The angel of the Lord came down,

And glory shone around.

there was

While shepherds washed their socks by night,

All seated round the tub,

The angel of the Lord came down.

And they began to scrub.

and instead of

Good King Wenceslas look’d out

On the Feast of Stephen,

When the snow lay round about,

Deep, and crisp, and even.

you would hear

Good King Wenceslas look’d out

On a cabbage garden.

Bumped his head on a brussels sprout,

Said, “I beg your pardon.”

But after many rehearsals by the school orchestra and the school choir, and rather fewer practices with the whole school, all seven hundred children, aged eleven to eighteen, of Bridport’s only secondary school, were ready to meet at the parish church in South St. to give their own Nine Lessons (parts of the Bible about the birth of Christ) and Carols. The church of St. Mary’s is full, not only of children and teachers, but of parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts and all kinds of friends and relations, as well as the Mayor and his wife and other important people of the area. The children are happy – it’s an afternoon off school for them. Most English carols are enjoyable to sing, and even if you’re not the best singer in the world, it doesn’t matter – there are another seven hundred voices to cover your mistakes.

A children’s nativity, Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, mid fifties.

As my father was the school music teacher, carol singing was always quite a large part of my Christmas. I sang not only in the school choir, but in other places as well. For my younger brother and me, the favourite was always the small town hospital, where my mother worked as a maternity sister. Every Christmas Eve we went up the hill to the hospital, where we sang a number of carols to the patients who had to stay in hospital over Christmas. It was not the singing that we enjoyed so much, but the food afterwards, and the appearance of Father Christmas on a sleigh, pulled not by reindeer but by two athletic doctors. Everybody knew who Father Christmas was, for only one person could be so very small as this jolly person in red. And if you did not realise who was hiding behind the cotton wool beard at first, then you soon found out when ‘he’ started speaking in a small, clear, musical Scottish accent. Santa Claus was Sister Jeannie Grant, one of the kindest and definitely the smallest person I have ever known. My mother tells me that everyone in the hospital, doctors, nurses and patients, were all very much afraid of her, and she could look at a doctor so that he started shaking in his shoes; but to my brother and myself she showed only kindness.

After the singing round the hospital wards came the visit to the matron’s office, and those wonderful mince pies, fresh out of the oven and full of that special flavour that tells you in no uncertain terms, “Christmas is here”. I don’t know if those were the first mince pies I ever tasted, but just whisper in my ear, as quiet as you can, “mince pie”, and the whole picture comes back: a forest of legs and table tops that I had to reach up to, a humming of adult voices around my ears, decorations across the ceiling high above me, and those little brown nests of pastry that, quite unlike my mother, told me, “Eat another, eat another!”

As The Day itself came closer and closer, there was hardly an evening that passed without a group of Carol singers standing in the street below one’s bedroom window, filling and emptying their lungs for all they were worth. The Christmas carols were always the same, good old traditional ones: Oh Come, All Ye Faithful; O Little Town of Bethlehem; Once in Royal David’s City; We Wish You a Merry Christmas – and while the carollers sang their hearts out, two or three of their number went from door to door collecting money, not for themselves, but for every charity you can imagine, from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. For my father, music teacher and choral conductor, these evening visits were not always sources of pleasure, for his excellent professional ear received every out-of-tune note like an unexpected train whistle; but for my brother and me it was different; each time a group of singers came we climbed out of bed and looked out through the bedroom windows, to see under the nearest street lamp a dark circle of people, in their hands a candle here, a battery torch there, like fireflies under the moon.

Another great occasion for the family, or at least the younger members of it, was the pre-Christmas trip to Exeter, where my grandparents and nearly all my mother’s relations lived. There were three great moments to the day; in the morning, our grandfather took us to Walton’s, an old family store full of dark Dickensian corners We went round to the back entrance, which during the rest of the year only the shop staff and the delivery men used. But at Christmas there was instead a long queue of parents and grandparents hand in hand with a hundred excited children. Inch by inch the queue slowly disappeared through the doorway, although it never became shorter, for always new children and adults joined the snake-like line that slowly made its way along the back corridors and stairways of the old building. My memories make the building enormous, the corridors and stairways unending; but I was small and so the aeons that I remember I spent in them were probably only minutes.

Finally the last turn came. You heard it coming before you saw it, for the air ahead became full of “oohs” and “aahs”. At last it was your turn to go round the final corner of semi-darkness and find yourself in a fairyland of thousands of coloured lights. Here began the magical world of Father Christmas!

Each year the Walton family decided on a folk tale: Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Babes in the Wood, Aladdin and his Magic Lamp. The tale was told in a series of scenes. For Cinderella we first came to a room with the two ugly sisters trying on their best clothes for the Prince’s Ball, and poor Cinderella on her knees, washing the floor. Each figure was life-size, and one part of the body moved; a head turned, or an arm moved, or the whole body bent at the waist. The costumes on the models were perfect, the result of hours and hours of hand-sewing. Slowly we followed the crowd, and the well-known story came to life in front of us; the Fairy Godmother turning the pumpkin into a beautiful golden carriage; Cinderella, now the most beautiful girl at the Ball, dancing with the Prince; again in her poor clothes trying on the glass slipper; and at last the wedding.

Now the story was over, but not the visit, for the best part was sitting there in front of us – an old man with a white beard and a red coat with a hood… Santa Claus himself. What I didn’t know then, but do now, is that Santa Claus was really Smoky Joe, an old tramp who lived on his own up in the hills. In good weather he lived in his hut of old pieces of wood. He never asked for money; he would work all day in somebody’s garden for a bag of food, and then disappear into the hills again. Some time before Christmas, the Walton family sent their spies out to look for Smoky Joe. When they brought him into the town, he moved into a hotel room, had a bath and washed his hair and beard, which was as long and white as Santa’s own. Smoky Joe had a skin disease, which was why he never shaved. Right up to Christmas he worked as Father Christmas, and stayed in his hotel room until the cold weather went away. Then one day the manager of the hotel would find that the room was empty, and send the Walton family the bill for the room.

But the true identity of Father Christmas was a well-kept secret. Thousands of adults knew, and kept that secret; not one child had any idea. And when a boy (usually) entered the unhappy state of beginning not to believe in Santa, and tried to prove that the old man in white did not really exist by pulling off the false beard, well, I’m sure it was not a painless experience for Smoky Joe, but it was certainly satisfying to see the child’s sudden look of surprise and confusion. I am sure that children in the Exeter area believed in Father Christmas, or at least in that Father Christmas, for far longer than in other places where the beard was only a temporary addition to the face behind it. For me it was the other way round. I can’t exactly remember when I stopped believing in Father Christmas, but I certainly did not tell my parents so, for that meant the end of those magical visits to Fairyland, the end of sitting on the old gentleman’s knee, and the end of the present that you got at the end: a small car or a plastic doll, a pencil case or a picture book.

The second great event of the day was a pre-Christmas lunch at my grandparents’ home. These were my maternal grandparents. I remember that both my grandmothers cooked traditionally but well, but it was only the last part of this meal that interested my brother and me – the Christmas pudding, the steaming hot, honey-sweet Christmas dish, so full of dried fruits and nuts that it was almost coal-black, with the red flames of burning brandy on the top. You need only the smallest amount to fill you up, and many families in Britain today split their Christmas dinner into two halves, because after the turkey roast you are so full already that you cannot enjoy your pudding afterwards. So the turkey comes, as usual, on the twenty-fifth of December, but the pudding waits until the next day, Boxing Day.

However, it was not the pudding itself that my brother and I were waiting for, but what hid inside. Traditionally, the cook put silver coins in the pudding, and the person who found a coin in his pudding was sure of a very lucky new year. But even when we were young children, there were no pure silver coins. Instead, my grandfather gave my grandmother a few old silver three-penny pieces that he kept in a box the rest of the year. I don’t suppose they were very old or very valuable, for my grandparents were not rich people, but for us they were exotic and exciting, and the most difficult part was when we had to give them back at the end of the meal, even though granddad always gave another new three-penny piece instead.

In the middle of the afternoon we left my grandparents’ home, and moved on to the end of town, where my uncle and aunt lived, and still live, for a pre-Christmas tea. My aunt makes the most wonderful cakes in the world, and at Christmas, especially when her children were still at home, and now, when they bring their own children, she does more than her usual best. Her Christmas cakes are not only delicious; they are works of art. What Leonardo da Vinci could do with a paintbrush, Auntie Vi can do with an icing bag. And every year there was something new on her Christmas cakes. There were so many I can’t remember them all, but I shall never forget the year she made a dozen choirboys out of marzipan, each in his church clothes and holding a carol book in his hands.