A ghost of Christmas past

Peter Paterson

Of Christmas Day at home before I reached the age of four, I have no recollection whatever. Nor can I recall the festival in 1936 when I was at the infants' department of the orphanage in a small seaside town on the Kent coast, except for one memory: we were taken to visit the local toy shop shortly before Christmas, where we were allowed to pick a present, and this we were presented with from a Christmas tree on the day itself.

Christmas Day at the main orphanage in South London — at any rate on the,`boys' side', for we never encountered the girls at all — was quite different from any other day, particularly for those unfortunate boys

who habitually wet their beds. It was the one day of the year when they were not obliged to rise before the morning bell sounded, make their way to the bathroom and rinse out their sheets. Failure to wake earlier than the rest of us meant running a gauntlet of punching, kicking and towel- flicking tormentors, egged on, it must be said in extenuation, by the house matrons.

Other rules and restrictions were also relaxed on Christmas Day. We were not re- quired to parade before each meal for an in- spection to ensure that our boots and' fingernails passed the scrutiny of the ex- sergeant major who carried out the odd maintenance jobs around the place, and

who then marched us four abreast along the drive to the dining hall, insisting that we stamped our right feet at every fourth step — a drill, I learned many years later, which had once been a ceremonial march practis- ed by the Rifle Brigade. Failure to pass muster on these inspections meant missing the meal, and then spending the time bet- ween the end of school and lights out mar- ching round and round the playground 'marking the fourth', or spending hours brushing our cropped heads with a hard bristle brush, or cleaning our two pairs of boots without the benefit of the usual Day and Martin's spit-on blacking.

Nor were we obliged on Christmas Day to eat all meals in silence, as was the rule for the rest of the year, with the exception of Sunday tea, when the supervisory staff withdrew, leaving the dining hall to the bullies and gang leaders to exact their tribute from the smaller boys — forcing us to surrender the thick slice of currant cake which was doled out once a week at this meal.

Christmas Day, by contrast, was bliss. Certainly by contrast with Christmas Eve, known to generations of boys in the or- phanage as Devil's Eve, when the staff, keyed up, no doubt, by the unalloyed joy due to be unleashed the following day, were invariably in a filthy temper. With a singular lack of imagination, the terraced houses where we hung our paper chains, were numbered rather than named. Each boy also had a number: hence, in the twice daily roll call and prayers in House No. 8, I shouted 'Twenty-Six!' to show that I had not absconded.

At one end of the terrace of houses, with staff accommodation on the ground floor, dormitories above, and with classrooms on the top floor, stood the play hall, for use in rainy weather, fronted by the playground. At the other was the dining hall, while in between was a large and enticing field which was strictly out of bounds, except on the annual Founder's Day, when we performed a pageant for visitors.

Visitors were also in evidence on Christmas Day, for members of the board of governors liked to put in an appearance, no doubt taking pleasure from their charitable efforts. Each of us woke to find a stocking at the end of his bed, containing the traditional mixture of small toys, sweets, nuts and an apple and orange. Presents sent to us by relations or friends outside were handed out before we assembl- ed for our Christmas dinner — the midday meal was never known as lunch.

After turkey and Christmas pudding, the chairman of the governors, a bald man with a huge nose and a diamond pin in his cravat, placed a bright new shilling from a large cash bag beside each boy's plate. It was a bequest from an 'old scholar', but one who must have been somewhat shaky about the rules of the institution, for no sooner was the money on the table than the house matron, following on behind, scooped it up. No boy was allowed to possess cash, although the odd would-be escaper (there was no point in having money except for this purpose) did amass a small hoard by hiding illicit coins in the knot of his tie. In fact, 'running away' en- tailed a huge risk, for on being returned the malefactor faced a public flogging, with 16 strokes of the cane as standard punishment.

To be fair, the Christmas shilling did not disappear into the pockets of the staff, but was returned to us at the rate of a penny a week to spend at the school tuck shop (opened on Saturday mornings only), always assuming that one could pass the special house inspection after breakfast on that day. This entailed a microscopic search for dust on any of the surfaces in the dor- mitories, plus the production of two pairs of gleaming boots and one's underpants, which after a week's wear were still required to be spotless.

After Christmas dinner most of the staff disappeared for their own meal, leaving the most junior master in charge of the 200 or so boys. Adjourning to the play hall, we were paired off and spent the afternoon working off our turkey and pudding in a series of wrestling matches, until it was time

The Spectator 18 December 1982 for tea. In the evening came the carol ser- vice, followed by a silent film show in- variably featuring, I recall, the adventures of an Alsatian dog, a precursor of Victorian founder — not unlike Karl Marx Lassie, known as Rin Tin Tin, and a cartoon featuring a character called Felix the Cal. And so to bed.

These pre-war Christmas traditions wercei

kept up by the orphanage when it manage to reassemble its scattered inmates from the first, disorganised, wartime evacuations and re-establish itself in a bankrupt private school in. Surrey. Portraits of the Victo, wearing wire spectacles — glowered down from the walls as they had done in the old premise and the ritual of giving away the shilling with one hand and taking it away wr with the other continued, along with the matches.estlinS It was a world which, thankfully, came toe an end for me in 1945, when I reached. th leaving age of 14, and which finally chsaPi peared in its old form with the operation °, the Butler Education Act — one reason ong froernr then on the orphanage was no I always had a soft spot for Rab. lrecognised as an educational establishmentr: and the children had to be sent out to dinary day schools, thus making it irriP°5115d ble to continue the frequent canings a an other humiliating punishments which ca scarcely have changed since the Pc" founded at the turn of the century. Yet looking back, my most encluntlie memories are not of the harshness of hip regime, but of the warm comPani°,./lsiioo and vast resourcefulness of rnY ded wrestlers, several of whom ran away' g11. $ only by a map of England torn froglay, pocket diary, making for some 111i remembered place where they had once ;id ed, despite the inevitability that they v`1,0) be returned. And, particularly, of tilTehave whoSe wit devised the funniest joke ',pie ever heard, assuring me, one misel'oor Saturday morning, that he had se e,1% matron's knickers on the washing 11°,ried and they had been far from clean.

with laughter.