Outdoors Les Davies MBE

West Countryman’s diary

CHRISTMAS approaches and I wonder how it got here so fast. The clocks have only just gone back, yet before we know it the shortest day will have come and gone. I am determined to make an effort at Christmas this year! Part of me thinks “Well it’s just another day” but another voice in my head says: “Yes, but do something just a little bit different.” Nostalgia certainly isn’t what it used to be, but every generation will look back to a time when they felt life was simpler.

No doubt there will be the usual classics on our television screens: White Christmas, perhaps a Carry On film or two with Hattie Jacques and Sid James’s distinctive laugh. I also hope for an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol with exaggerated acting and lots of affected “Cockney” accents.

Anyone who has watched that classic film Mary Poppins will remember the way in which Dick Van-Dyke murdered an East end London accent.

I have recently come into possession (that sounds a bit dodgy) of a full DVD set from the Black Adder series. I’m not very keen on the first series with Brian Blessed shouting a lot and Rowan Atkinson playing the buffoon, but the rest are pure gold, especially the Regency period.

That’s going to be my Christmas entertainment! That Dickens story, Christmas Carol with Ebenezer Scrooge is the basis of my story this time. So, more than slightly adapted, here is my version.

Sitting in front of the wood burner is one of the pleasures that winter brings. It also brings feelings of drowsiness that can lapse into pleasant sleep. So begins my story of one of those wonderful dreams that takes me back with the Ghost of Christmas past.

I am now in the kitchen of No 1 Hales Farm Cottage and cannot have been but a few years old. Even though electric lighting was installed the day my mother brought me home from the nursing home in 1952, the oil lamp is still in use. It sits on the pine kitchen table that was always covered with a plasticised linen tablecloth.

I can still recall the smell of that wooden table. The light casts a golden glow around the room, but never really enough to read by. I’m scooped up by my mother and taken lovingly up the twisting stair to bed, where she would read a bedtime story.

There was never any problems sleeping way back then, it’s only in my later years that I wake in the early hours with some sort of thoughts going through my head.

As I grew older and more aware of things, Christmas became the most exciting day of the year. Christmas Eve is still in my memory as being cold and frosty. I would stay outside as long as I could even after dark. In those hedonistic days of a belief in Father Christmas and all he brought, sleeping on Christmas Eve was difficult.

I would go to bed with a new sock that my grandmother had knitted and eventually sleep would gather me until the morning. I awoke in the half light to view the angular shape of the sock that hung from the bottom bed post. What had the man himself brought for me this time?

When I was eventually allowed to empty its contents on the bed there would be some nuts, fruit and a few small toys. All this sounds very boring by today’s standards of merchandising, but to a small boy growing up in an era where money was not so free flowing, it was still special.

The day would come and go all too quickly and with it a feeling of loss that something so special had to end, as all things special eventually do!

My dream now fast forwards to Tickenham Junior School at Christmas. There would be a party with games and a lesser emphasis on learning during that last day before the Christmas holiday. It seemed that just for once the drudgery of school had been relieved.

There was laughter, a Christmas lunch and small presents from the tree for everyone. A nativity play complete with shepherds who wore tea towels on their heads was delivered. Carols were sung and eventually in the growing darkness, we were all escorted up the road to catch the

bus home. A release from the penal colony of school for a couple of weeks! I am now a silent watcher in the assembly hall at Clevedon Secondary Modern School. How different this is from Tickenham! I am starting to achieve things With LES DAVIES MBE as my confidence grows and teachers take an interest in my development. The assembly hall with its stage is the centre of communal life within the school and it’s the Christmas party laid on for the first year pupils of 1963. There are lots of quizzes and games led by the teachers. A truly fun time that in future years matures to meet the growing needs of our age. Games become replaced by a disco and again the teachers join in. School plays are laid on and I get the lead role of Toad in a first year’s production of Wind in the Willows. Leaving school to start work means a real grown-up Christmas party at the Long Ashton Research Station. An early finish to work on the day of the Christmas lunch starts with a visit to what was then the Robin Hood’s Retreat pub. As an onlooker in my dream, I watch the orchard team mix and share jokes before we all go down for a lunch and home-spun entertainment in the staff canteen. Nowadays my staff Christmas lunch will be a pork roll, (with all the trimmings of course) at the Pit-Stop sandwich van in Wells. My mind also wanders back to Christmases of my children’s childhood and the time they were so excited that my late wife Sue and I didn’t get any sleep on Christmas Eve. I could re-live the joy of Christmas through their excitement once again. My son Daniel is doing the same with his family in Cambridge. My daughter Lizzie is with a new school community in China, where with other Western teachers she will no doubt have a better Christmas this year than she did the last! As for Christmas future . . . well who knows what that will bring. None of us can predict the future, but the most important thing is to treasure what we have. Happy Christmas everyone no matter where you might be! Will it be a white Christmas?