Thoughts While Preparing the Turkey

Christmas 1948

The first Christmas I remember was in 1948, when my mother and I were living in Toronto.

Mother, who had been a Salvation Army officer in England before she met and married my father, was in charge of the Bedford Park Salvation Army Corps, just off Yonge Street on Glenforest Road in North Toronto. My father was in the Salvation Army Training College for Officers. Although he wasn’t far away, we didn’t get to see much of him because training was a year-long, full-time, live-in commitment.

We lived at the back of The Salvation Army hall, long since demolished to make way for housing. There was an entrance from our ‘quarters’ right onto the platform, and I sometimes wandered through it looking for my mother after waking up from a bad dream — once or twice to the amusement of those attending a Sunday evening prayer meeting.

North Toronto was much less developed at that time. On snowy days I could safely slide up and down the middle of the street on a pair of makeshift wooden skis strapped over my street shoes. I had friends in the neighbourhood, too, and I remember getting into lots of scrapes with them.

We spent only one Christmas there because in 1949 we were packed off to Pembroke, Ontario, where father (Second Lieutenant James ‘Jim’ Cornie) became the commanding officer and mother had to cease being ‘captain’, and give up her fourteen years of seniority so that she would not outrank her fresh-from-training-college husband, whose second-in-command she now became.

Going to see Santa at Eaton’s (or was it Simpson’s?) meant lining up through a long grotto with display cases of all the latest toys on either side. I had eyes only for the electric trains, so I asked Santa for one, complete with Pullman car and caboose, vouchsafing the information to mother, too, just in case Santa forgot.

Christmas morning came, and I set aside the sock stuffed to overflowing with candy and small thing-a-ma-bobs to make straight for a large box that I just knew had my electric train set inside it. Once I had unwrapped it my heart sank. It was a pull-along wooden train. There was no electric track. In fact, there was no track at all. The box didn’t look shiny new, either.

I cried with frustration and disappointment, and my mother must have been heartbroken. She didn’t have any way of buying me an electric train, because as a Salvation Army officer — and a female one — she had barely enough to live on. And father wasn’t earning money, either, while in training. So why hadn’t Santa come through? In a sense, I suppose he had. The wooden train must have been passed along by some kindly member of mother’s congregation, because even that gift, I later found out, was beyond her financial reach. I was inconsolable, however, and I think it made me lower my expectations of Santa Claus. At least, I do not remember ever being as disappointed again. Or asking so much.

Christmas in the early 1950s

My memories of Christmases as a boy back in England echo those of Dylan Thomas in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”.

Sometimes I would help my grandmother before Christmas. She wore a pinafore with a big pocket in the front where she kept all sort of treats. She made puddings and baked pies and cakes for weeks before Christmas. Her Christmas fruitcake, complete with marzipan and icing and little snowmen, was made months ahead and left to mature in the pantry outside the scullery door. But my favourite was the saffron cake that she made in the days before Christmas so that it would not be stale. I loved to lick the spoon and clean the bowl when she had finished.

On Christmas Eve and at least once a week the rest of the year, I’d watch her pour creamy Jersey milk into a large flat pan, which she set on a very low burner on top of the gas stove overnight. In the morning she’d skim off the richest clotted cream you could imagine, and pour the rest of the milk back into a jug.

While gran was alive, all our relatives came to our house on Christmas evening. I can picture my uncles with their legs stretched out, exchanging  their postprandial Woodbine cigarettes for the once-a-year treat of Wills’ Whiffs. (W.D. and H.O. Wills was a Bristol company, which demanded the loyalty of Devon smokers — loyalty unto death for an uncle and an aunt who succumbed to smoking-related diseases before they reached 50.)

My aunts generally took over the front room. That was where the piano was and where everyone finished the evening once mother had moved the bamboo cupboard into the window bay and the sofa back to the wall to make room for the extra chairs. We ate chocolates and nibbled on walnuts, cobs and Brazil nuts from a big crystal bowl, and my cousins showed off their Christmas presents. Later, mother would sit at the upright piano and play carols while we sang along. It usually finished when Aunt Evelyn sang ‘The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill”.

Then the room would go quiet and my aunts and uncles would start to reminisce.

They’d tell each other the same stories every year, about when they were young, and what their parents had told them. It was there that the family lore was handed down. I heard how before the Great War, when the family lived in One and Two Sutton Road, they would have singalongs through the open windows giving onto the common courtyard, and how Uncle Bill, the cobbler who was courting Aunt Olive, would sit on the window sill and play his mouthorgan with such skill that he won Olive’s heart. They talked about those who had died long ago and made them come alive in my imagination: Uncle Sid, who was killed by German bombing two streets over, and Granny Down, who died at the outset of that war when she was 90, but had good ankles even in old age (but not all her memory). And Jack Down, her husband, who joined The Salvation Army in Victorian times when he left his village on Dartmoor to find work in Plymouth. He tended the horses at the Harvest Home coaching inn, I believe. These long dead ancestors all became part of my memory, too, as I listened to their stories around the dying coal fire in the cigar-fogged front room on Christmas Days in Julian Street.

I learned other things, too. My gran taught me how to dunk ginger biscuits. She took her morning tea and biscuits sitting at in the window of her upstairs bedroom. I remember one occasion sitting on her lap and watching a flock of sheep being herded along the road outside our house to the slaughterhouse in Prince Rock (we could smell the rendering works beside it — or ‘glue factory’, as we called it— when the wind was in the wrong direction). I think that was the first time I tasted a ginger biscuit dunked in hot tea. I have never lost the taste for it.

I also learned how to brush her long white hair, which she normally kept in a bun, but loosed at bedtime when it fell around her shoulders under her nightcap. She had a fourposter bed, or it had once been one before the top had been removed, and the mahogany posts at each corner had concealed panels. As soon as gran showed me how to open them they became a place to stash things worth hiding because of their value to small boys, such as Dinky toys, marbles or cigarette cards.

What a wonderful childhood I had!

A Christmas Wish

Every year I enjoy watching Alistair Sim and Kathleen Harrison, et al, in the 1951 movie version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ (‘Scrooge’ in England). I love to see the expression on Scrooge’s face when he realises that it is not too late to change and that redemption can be had. What a contrast to almost every other TV show or movie we see nowadays, when the bad guys get their comeuppance!

Now, as much as I love to watch Kyra Sedgwick as Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson getting the confession out of her suspect in ‘The Closer’, I sometimes wonder what happens next. Surely obtaining a conviction is not the be-all and end-all of the justice system, although it may be what the police focus on. What about remorse, repentance, restitution, redemption, reconciliation, rehabilitation, and any other ‘re’s you think of? Perhaps it’s asking too much of a 50-minute TV show, but I’d like to see more shows that don’t stop with the apparent guilt of the ‘offender’ but take us beyond that into the possibility of reclamation — into a life restored and a purpose fulfilled.

Not realistic, perhaps, and certainly not in keeping with the hang ’em high philosophy current in popular media, but it strikes me as a more Christian approach. And what could be more appropriate at this time of the year?