CHRISTMAS IS COMING!
I don't think you need any warning of the fact that by the time you read this there are only 17 shopping days left. I have little doubt that many of you will only be too aware of 'pester-power' reinforced by our friends the marketing people. The usual thing you will get from Crumblies like me at this time of the year is an extended whinge about how Christmas is too commercialised. It may be that this is true but if it is I can't do anything about it, I live in the same high tech world as you. No, I thought I'd remind you of how things used to be many years ago.
I don't think of myself as old and have a vague feeling of surprise when I can start a sentence with... “Seventy years ago, when I was almost seven years old” but there you are! It was Stockport in 1942 and we were three years into the Second World War. Apart from the constant worry about us losing, and that was a very real fear even for us kids, there was the possibility of air raids. We didn't know then that the worst of the bombing was over but we could remember the nights spent in the Anderson shelter in our back yard, how cold and damp it was and the candles guttering on the angle iron frame down each side. The only luxury we had was a wooden bench to sit on and occasional entertainment from one of our neighbours, a jeweller, who made small animals out of candle wax for us. Add to this the black-out, no street lights, car headlamps covered with a grill to stop them being seen from the air and perhaps even worse, no lighted windows because they were all blacked out by special curtains. Until you have experienced this you don't realise how warm and friendly a lighted window in a house is. The effects of the black-out were made worse by living in a heavily industrialised valley where we had pollution from coal burning in the mills and on domestic fires and an almost constant 'inversion layer' which is an atmospheric peculiarity whereby smoke was trapped and couldn't get away if there was no wind. This meant that we had fog you will not believe! My mother once got lost in the fog going to the corner shop only 200 yards away and it took her an hour to find her way back home. So, you could say it was a bit gloomy all round!
Then there were the shortages. Everything except bread and potatoes was rationed and even they dried up at times. 'Everything' means everything, even the most common items you take for granted these days. Simple things like paper and soap were virtually unobtainable and even if they were in the shops you had to queue for them. Funny thing is I can never remember torch batteries being scarce, I suppose they had to make sure they were available because of the black-out. It's not a pretty picture is it. Start with the assumption that nothing you wanted was readily available, you had to find a way round the problem.
However, one thing that Adolph couldn't spoil was Christmas. Indeed, I think the fact that we were in such dire circumstances made it much more special. If there was going to be any relief at all, it would happen at Christmas. At the beginning of December we were encouraged to write our Christmas letters to Santa telling him what we would like as a present. The magic about this was that we had our own personal postal service to send them. We sat round the fire writing our letters on scraps of paper and then posted them by holding them over the open fire till they burst into flame and letting them go. The draught in the flue grabbed them and whirled the flaming paper up the chimney and we knew for certain they had gone direct to Santa. After all we knew he liked chimneys because that was how he got into the house to deliver the presents! Looking back, I'm sure this was useful to mother and father because it gave them an idea of our expectations. Whether they could be met was of course another matter. The funny thing is that we weren't greedy, we didn't ask for the impossible, I think we had been conditioned by the war.
Once the letters were dealt with mother turned her mind to the Christmas decorations. I should point out that all this fell on her shoulders because father was working all the hours God sent for the war effort. In those days you didn't pop out to the shops for some Christmas lights and decorations, you made do with what had survived from pre-war days or the Christmas before and made the rest yourselves. Mother always managed to find some coloured crepe paper and when she had made some flour and water paste for glue, gave us a pair of scissors apiece and we set to making paper chains. When we had a fair heap we put them up straight away strung across the room because this was the best way of making sure they weren't damaged. We decorated the kitchen and the front room, any left-overs went up in the hall. I can still remember how cheerful everything looked when the paper chains were up, the house felt warmer as well!
The next stage in mother's campaign was to take us for a walk, or, if we were lucky, on the tram to Hazel Grove from where we walked a couple of miles up the road to Middlewood near Poynton. Our goal on that trip was to find Holly and if we were lucky, Mistletoe. Another funny thing, I can never remember anyone bothering us when we were doing this. I think nowadays we would have the land owner after us. Whatever, we always ended up back at home with plenty of greenery. The stepladders came out and the greenery was festooned over anything that would accept it. No Sellotape in those days, string and drawing pins was how you fastened it.
By the end of the first week in December we had finished the first stage of getting ready for Christmas. Looking back, I'm sure my mother was pretty good on psychology. I think she recognised that the war was damaging to us kids and tried to make this process of getting ready for Christmas a nice time and almost an adventure for us. Apart from the activities, small unexpected treats would appear from nowhere. I think that father's contacts in the dreaded Black Market may have been involved here! She would make brandy-snaps or biscuits for us, unheard of normally. These days I suppose kids wouldn't see these as luxuries but to us it was like a little piece of heaven. She had some more tricks up her sleeve as well, we'll look at those next week.
Christmas decorations in the weaving shed.