I don’t know when I
stopped wholly believing in Father Christmas but even as a very young child I
only half accepted the idea of a benevolent personage dressed in that eye catching
ermine trimmed red robe careering through the night sky pulled by a team of
reindeer. Naturally enough I certainly
wanted to believe but my faith was only ever half hearted. These
were just thoughts never voiced aloud and openly for fear of upsetting my
mother who to all intents and purposes appeared to believe in the myth herself. I didn’t care as much about my father’s hurt
feelings. Anyway it’s hard to be a true
and steadfast believer when you’ve stood in Gravesend market in early December whilst
your parents thumbed through second hand Rupert and Toby Twirl Annuals and
discussed in whispers whether they would be suitable for you. It
might of course eventuate that they ordered and paid for the Christmas gifts
then sent them off to Father Christmas for delivery like some kind of
international postal service but it seemed unlikely. It was Alan Spooner who came up with that
idea and it was hard to take seriously much of what he said simply because he
had a definite reading problem and lagged well behind the rest of us when we
had Reading Out Loud around the class. In
any event it seemed prudent to allow the adults in my life to have their
secrets no matter how improbable they might seem to me.
We didn’t have the Tooth
Fairy in our family and that was probably on account of my mother having so
many siblings and my father being raised in an orphanage. It
could have been a most expensive exercise for my maternal grandparents and
would have surely needed a sponsor if multiple visits to the orphanage in
Chatham were to be carried out. My cousin Pat said only Toffs had the Tooth
Fairy anyway but there were a few children in my class at St Botolph’s who I
knew to have a firm relationship with her (back then fairies were to me always
female). Maureen Bowler was one of
them but Pat maintained she came into the Toff category on account of her
father being a primary school teacher. I
could never quite make my mind up about Maureen but it was clear the teachers
viewed her differently from the rest of us, speaking to her with a kinder tone
and paying more attention when her hand shot up to answer a question which it
tended to a great deal of the time.
They treated Helen the vicar’s daughter similarly but I don’t quite
recall if I was ever aware of her Tooth Fairy status and I’ve forgotten how
frequently her hand went up. The
majority of us who lacked any position at all with that munificent dental sprite
unkindly labelled those receiving sixpences for their expelled teeth as Babies.
By the time we reached
the age of eight or nine we were ambivalent when it came to a belief in Witches
because they were at a surface level ordinary women, old with stringy grey
hair, who were simply likely to own black cats and these days you might even
say they were just part of a Special Interest Group. We knew it wasn’t necessary for them to wear
black conical hats all the time and use broomsticks for transport. And even in the unenlightened days of the
late 1940s we were aware that some of the Magic involved might even be for the
greater good of the community. Jennifer
Berryman said that her grandmother’s neighbour was definitely a Witch and
always used the buses but added a little hastily that she only worked Really Good
Magic. Sometimes Witches were easily recognised by
the houses they lived in and Kathleen the red-haired daughter of the couple who
kept The Queen’s Head on The Hill once swore me to secrecy before disclosing
that the cottage directly opposite the pub definitely housed a Witch and added
that she once saw her taking off on her broomstick from the roof. I found that very difficult to believe but I
didn’t say so at the time. When I asked my older cousin Margaret whether
she believed in Witches she said it was an old-fashioned idea and nobody with
any sense thought they were real.
On the other hand where
the paranormal was concerned, when it came to Ghosts we all seemed to hold an
acceptance and certainty that they existed and even walked among us. At any age we were likely to catch a glimpse
of a family member or neighbour who had departed from earthly life and these
sightings, though often unsettling were rarely commented upon negatively. My mother and aunts regularly told each other
stories of communing with the unfortunate siblings recently succumbed to TB who
sometimes reappeared and gave advice with regard to the babies they had left
behind. And for years my mother was
inclined to talk about that terrible time following the death of her beloved
fiancé, Fred, who should by rights have been my father and what a comfort it
had been when he came and stood at her bedside at night and told her not to
mourn him. Decades later my younger
brother, then almost grown to adulthood claimed to have had a long conversation
with our dead father who appeared to him in his army uniform on the night his
own son was born. Because I only half
believed anything my brother said I reserved judgement on this incident whilst
nervously hoping he would not also choose to make a similar visit to me. Unlike others in the family I never quite
reached a state of nonchalance regarding apparitions.
We showed a definite
eagerness when it came to a faith in the predictions of Seers and Soothsayers
and at any age were keen to patronise the latest fairground clairvoyant. All my aunts looked forward to the annual
Fair that for a number of years visited the local Northfleet parks before
deciding to favour Gravesend because of some kind of Falling Out among the
promoters. Despite the inconvenience of
a longer bus ride they queued up outside Madame Desiree’s striped tent with
eager regularity, each opting to pay for both hands plus the crystal ball. I was destined later in my life to be
astonished by the accuracy of a range of predictions emanating from one Madame
Sandra then working out of a small office in Oxford Street.
During the chunk of the
twentieth century during which I grew up it would be fair to say that the
working classes were familiar and comfortable with those who predicted the
future not simply on a personal level.
Francis Moore, responsible for producing what was known as Old Moore’s
Almanack had been himself born into poverty in Bridgenorth in the 1660s. His Almanack published from 1697 became
enormously popular. Despite his humble
beginnings he became a self taught physician and astrologer and eventually
served at the court of Charles the second.
His early publications seemed to cautiously revolve around weather
forecasts and even my illiterate grandmother claimed that folk swore by
them. Even the rather less familiar
Nostradamus was a prophet well known to my mother who was fond of announcing
that he had known all about Adolph Hitler and what a pity it was that the World
did not heed his warnings.
Guardian Angels were definitely a popularly accepted
idea among children in the 1940s and 1950s and frequently credited with saving
them from danger and injury. Roger
Ribbins’ mother told all and sundry, including the local newspaper that her
little Roger was being looked after by his Guardian Angel the day he hurtled
from the top of the cliff and into the adjacent chalk pit and yet had astonishingly
been able to get to his feet and want to carry on with the boisterous game that
had initially put him in that dangerous position. In these infinitely more forward thinking
days of Health & Safety and common concern there might be more questions
posed as to who had allowed little Roger and his friends to cavort on the
clifftop in the first place and why more safety measures had not been installed
to prevent such an alarming experience. To
be fair my mother voiced similarly judgemental comments at the time of the
accident, adding rather uncharitably that she thought that any Guardian Angel
detailed to keep an eye on the Ribbins children would definitely have his work
cut out. All things considered it would
appear that there is rather less need for Guardian Angels in these first
decades of the twenty second century.
More of us aligned
ourselves with religion in the middle years of the last century even if we did
not hold a totally firm conviction that God was real. My older male cousins, especially Les and
Young Harold were apt to ridicule me if I announced a belief in God and say I
was Soft in the head to believe such rubbish and Aunt Mag never once reprimanded
them which made my mother give them very cold looks. Whether or not we accepted the existence of
the Almighty all of us aligned ourselves firmly with Christian precepts and
when asked which religious line of thought we followed unhesitatingly answered
Church of England or Catholic or Presbyterian even if we regularly declared
that the idea was nonsense. This
flexible attitude allowed us to pay little attention to Church attendance if it
proved to be inconvenient yet at the
same time look kindly upon ideas like Re-incarnation and should an elderly
relative die at around the time a new family member was born, the new child was
often named for and cheerfully spoken of as some kind of second coming of he or
she who had passed.
Overall it was a time
when as a society we were loath to entirely dismiss matters esoteric, possibly
even viewing such ideas as a kind of primitive intellectual glue and aid to
understanding difficult concepts. And
perhaps that is why there was a reluctance to upset our parents by passing on negative
ideas like a lost faith in Father Christmas.
As time passed some of us
came to the conclusion that there is something about the human condition that
makes us as a whole extraordinarily susceptible to the acceptance of
incongruous notions, very often belief systems that we know instinctively to be
false or, worse still that ordinary common sense dictates are false. It is no doubt this that allows us to be
hijacked from time to time by those who would have us move in a specific
direction and take on ideas that we know to be monstrous yet lack the good
sense to say so until it is too late.
Once an outrageous idea has its tentacles firmly in the group
consciousness and the accompanying dogma is nicely settled in concrete we might
begin to whisper one to another that we don’t actually Believe …… but of course
by then it is too late. Hopefully not
too much harm is done.
