A Festive Tale

Christmas time&

Local author Stephen Gregory writes a tale about the magic of Christmas, and the passage of time…

It was the week before Christmas 2022. Ceri had come into the castle to take a look at the “Christmas fayre.’ That was how it was advertised, with its olde-worlde spelling... a Christmas fayre inside Caernarfon Castle. He’d come on his own, because he wanted to browse the stalls and buy a present for his mum.

It was a dark and icy afternoon. Ceri entered the castle through the King’s Gate and found the courtyard was full of a noisy, jostling crowd. The air was whirling with smoke from barbecues cooking all kinds of sausages and ribs and sizzling steaks. The flames flashed and flared,

the sparks flew and fizzled on

the frosty grass.

There was music too. A group of young men dressed in smocks and stockings and leathery boots were playing on their bagpipes and flutes and fiddles... so that the whole effect

was deliberately ‘olde-worlde’, to portray the castle as it might have been a few hundred years ago. He popped another piece of chocolate into his mouth. The packaging was glossy and expensive, with a beautiful photograph of the castle taken at night-time from the other side of the river Seiont... the walls and towers golden in floodlights, against a black sky.

He heard the familiar sound of the hand-bell ringing which meant that the castle would be closing soon, and he realised that the crowds were thinning and he still hadn’t found a present for his mum.

Ceri found himself happily enthralled by the flames and the

smoke and music and the bustle of festive people. He felt like a local – he was nine years old, he lived here, in this town, and these were his neighbours and friends. There was Cemlyn, manning one of the stalls. Cemlyn had worked in the castle for years. He spotted Ceri and waved him to come nearer, and he did his familiar naughty trick of taking a bar of Caernarfon Castle chocolate, accidentally-on purpose cracking it on the corner of his stall and saying ‘oops, this one seems to be broken...’ and opening it to share with Ceri.

Cemlyn himself was dressed in supposedly medieval clothes, and looking a bit silly – indeed all the people who worked inside the castle were wearing smocks and tights and boots – so that Ceri, as he thanked Cemlyn and wandered away with his chocolate, wondered if the place had really looked and sounded and smelled like this in olden times, or if this was only a bit of pantomime. Rummaging for coins, stuffing the chocolate bar into his coat

pocket, he bought a snow-globe from another stall, just as the man was packing away his things. Yes, the castle was emptying quickly, the fires were being quenched, there were

clouds of billowing blue smoke.

It stung his eyes. He rubbed at them and spluttered. To get out of the smoke for just a moment, long enough to try and clear his vision and start heading out of the castle, Ceri stepped from the courtyard and into the doorway of the Black Tower. He moved along the corridor, into a deep and enveloping darkness.

A few seconds later – or a minute? – hours and days, and then weeks and years seemed to fall away from him. The centuries were like shadows. They folded into the blackness of the tunnel... and when he rubbed the smoke from his eyes and blinked around him, everything had changed.

There was no castle. He knew, somehow, that he was in the same place as he’d been in a few moments before – but the castle had gone. Or rather, he sensed that it hadn’t been there... not yet.

Not yet. It was the week before Christmas, 1283. It was a dark and frosty evening. There were fires burning and the sweet

smells of cooking meat. There were huddles of people around their fires, and they were talking and eating and drinking,

they were laughing and arguing, they were singing and playing on flutes and pipes.

But no castle. It was a building site.

The work had only started a few months ago. Nothing but heaps of earth and rubble... earthworks where a huge mound was taking shape, where ditches and trenches were being excavated for the foundations of a future castle of stone. Wooden huts, probably for the labourers and builders to live in, a village of lean-to shelters. And sprouting here and there and into the night sky, a forest of scaffolding.

Not yet a forest... but as though saplings were growing, thin spindly poles of timber bound together with ropes and thongs of leather. And sitting around them, a group of boys about the same age as Ceri were enjoying their own space and their fires and food and laughter.

One of the boys glanced across at Ceri. There was a curious moment of eye-contact, almost recognition, across generations and hundreds of years. The boy beckoned Ceri to come closer. And so Ceri sat at the fireside with the boys

and he shared their laughter and their food. They touched his clothes and marvelled at them, as though he were a prince who had deigned to move among them. He himself gazed at their woollen tunics and thick, warm jackets, at their scuffed and work-scarred leather boots... and they told him, by gestures and in their unfamiliar voices, that they were the scaffolding boys.

It was their job, in the very earliest stages of work on the castle, to construct the scaffolding. For they were young and tough and agile, they could clamber as surely and as bravely as the squirrels in the woodlands. Their fingers were strong. And so Ceri and the scaffolding boys shared the excited curiosity of boyhood. There was no castle, not yet. But Ceri showed them, as if by magic, what their castle would become one day. He brought out the chocolate... and there was a photograph of Caernarfon Castle, as though complete, its walls and towers cast into golden light, against a black sky.

The boys marvelled at the image he showed them. Was it possible? Would the heaps of rubble and their precarious scaffolding ever become such a mighty fortress?

They tasted the chocolate, a miracle more fantastic than the future vision of their castle. And Ceri, to try and bridge the gap between his 21st Century self and his 13th Century ancestors, accepted their mischievous challenge... to clamber and swing on their scaffolding.

He took off his gloves and stuffed them into his pockets. He started to climb. At first it was easy and he swarmed up and

up. But when he looked down, at the campfires below him

and the boys’ upturned faces... and when the smoke billowed around him and stung his eyes and made him splutter... he felt his fingers slipping from the timbers, he felt the whole

unsteady structure swaying and shifting, and he fell.

He seemed to fall a long way, for a long time. For hours and days and years. When he landed with a thump which knocked the wind from his stomach and banged his head on the ground, scores of generations and many centuries had slipped by.

He opened his eyes. Someone was helping him to his feet. It was Cemlyn, who’d given him the broken bar of chocolate. And as Ceri stood up and looked around him, he saw that the walls and towers of the castle were just as they’d been before, in the Christmas fayre of December 2022.

Yes, he muttered to Cemlyn ... he must have slipped and bumped his head. He made his way out of the castle, feeling in his pockets for his gloves. He felt the snow globe which he’d bought for his mum. But no chocolate. He’d left it behind, with his friends – in the very same place, but in a different time altogether. n

Stephen Gregory’s first novel, The Cormorant, which he wrote in Snowdonia 35 years ago, has been published several times in both the UK and the USA, and translated into German, Polish and Italian. The new edition, which is available from Parthian Books, is its tenth publication.