Great Meadow by Dirk Bogarde Read Free Book Online

the presents. We knew it was about the day that Jesus was born and everything, and the presents were supposed to be the ones the kings all brought to the manger that time, but we got a bit muddly about Santa Claus, who seemed quite different from holy things. And it was quite hard to understand. Anyway, it didn’t matter much because I knew, ages ago, it wasn’t Santa Claus but our father, because I watched one night and saw him creep in and put the stockings at the end of our bed. And years ago, when we were really quite small, Lally took us for the day to Mrs Jane’s at Walnut Cottage and, as a special treat, we went to Bentalls in Kingston to see the Goblins’ Grotto and Father Christmas. It was a bit worrying because we had seen him at Selfridge’s the week before -only, he was at the North Pole there. We stood in a long line waiting to have a word with him, and when it was my sister’s turn she went rather red in the face, and he put her on his knee and was being quite decent to her when she suddenly hit him and screamed and screamed so that Lally and Mrs Jane had to rush and take her away. She sobbed and snivelled all the way through the lampshade department and even through the corset one. It was awful really. And people kept turning round.
    We went down in the lift and when we got to soft furnishings Lally made us sit down, dried my sister’s eyes and asked what on earth was all the fuss about.
    â€˜He had terrible red eyes!’ said my sister.
    â€˜Nonsense!’ said Lally. ‘Red eyes indeed.’
    â€˜Red . . .’ she wailed. ‘And awful long whiskers and hemade rumbling noises at me and said if I hadn’t been a good child in the year he’d come down the chimney and sort me out.’
    It took a long time to get her all right, and they only did it at the ABC tea shop when Lally let her have first choose of the cakes. So then she shut up. But we never mentioned Santa Claus again really. And every time she saw one, and there seemed to be hundreds everywhere, she grabbed Lally’s hand and hid herself in her skirts. She was very relieved that we had a gas fire in the nursery so he couldn’t get down the chimney anyway.
    So we knew that presents really came from family and from kind people we knew.
    Because we hadn’t much kith and kin of our own, we had to invent uncles and aunts, which was quite good in a way because you only had the ones you really liked as uncle or aunt. The rest you just called Mr or Mrs and they didn’t count.
    Of course, we did have some real kith and kin up in Scotland, who belonged to our mother, but we didn’t see them often because they lived so far away in the cold and mists, and although they were quite nice, I suppose, they weren’t a bit like us. The one bad mark against them was the presents they sent, and they were awful. I mean, you always knew exactly what the present was long before you even opened it.
    Flat.
    Just flat.
    No lovely bumps and lumps and poky bits sticking through the paper which made it really exciting, just flat.
    So you just knew it was a box of Edinburgh rock or a pair of gloves, or a jigsaw puzzle, or worse still, a book. I mean, whoever sent anyone a book for Christmas? You’d have to read it before you could write the Thank You Letter and you never read a book at holidays. Only at school. Forced.
    There was no fun in books or gloves or Edinburgh rock, even though the rock was quite nice, especially the cinnamon bits, but sweets aren’t very interesting even in tartan boxes with pictures of Prince’s Street on the back. Boring. And gloves. Whoever wants gloves when you’ve got your own anyway?
    So we just knew by the
flatness
what we were in for and left them to the last to open, but we still had to write Thank Yous. Lally kept all the labels and wrote on them saying who they were from and what they had been, because things did get into a bit of a mess on Christmas