Un-Christmas visits
By ROBIN McDOU ALL
T SHALL be spending Christmas with my dearest 'friends, in one of the pleasantest houses I know. It stands in a fine position, is marvellously pretty within and is surrounded by beautiful country. The heating works. The bath-water is always hot. The food is delicious. There is limitless drink. The servants (yes, plural) are charming and, so often do I stay there, that they call my room 'Mr. McDouall's room.' As those five days go happily by, I shall think of how I might have been spend- ing Christmas, were 1 less fortunate.
I might be spending Christmas in prison: about 34,000 people are. The 'halls' have been decorated with Christmas trees, holly and paper streamers. For some weeks the food has been even worse than usual so that the caterer could save up to provide roast pork and a super duff on Christmas Day. There will be a glass of ginger wine to add to the festivities. (A few of the wider boys will, I hope, have smuggled in half-bottles of whisky.) As a great treat there may even be. an orange or a banana. Cells will be decorated with Christmas cards from loved ones and tobacco will be scarce because of the Christmas cards that have been bought for loved ones with tobacco money.
I might be spending Christmas in hospital. In each ward there is a Christmas tree and some faded chrysanthemums. The doctor, the matron, the ward-sister, a succession of pretty (and less pretty) nurses come into the ward and cheerily .vish the patients a Merry Christmas. There is a Christmas service on the radio, the Queen on tele- vision, a party of carol-singers in the evening: if they are good, the sick are reduced to tears; if, as is more likely, they are bad, the sick can sin-
cerely wish them a merry Christmas elsewhere.
Almost as bad as Christmas in prison or hos- pital would be Christmas in a seaside hotel. One changes for dinner, of course. Brown Windsor is replaced by Cong-som-may. A fragment of fish with a French name turns out to be lemon sole, garnished with a pickled walnut. There follows a piece of battery turkey, laced with Bisto. Finally, a parody of plum pudding, draped with photo- paste enlived with rum essence. And then the fun really begins: cotton-wool balls, paper streamers, balloons. All one's pent-up hatred can be in- dulged. Ha! got old Miss Beagle on the nose— too bad it wasn't a stone. Hurray! landed a streamer in Mr. Bogle's sparkling moselle. Bang ! there goes cute little Mavis's balloon.
Christmas on a cruise must be much the same, except that there is the chance of jumping lightly overboard and getting away from it all.
1 should not like to be a patient West Indian bus conductor at any time and certainly not at Christmas. I should not like to be a bus- or train-
driver. I should not at all like to be a waitress in a British Railways buffet at Christmas. The cus- tomers, reeling with hangover, come in and ask for a lager or a brandy and ginger ale; they have to be told it is out of hours and fobbed off with a four-day-old bun and a cup of tea.
I should very much dislike having to spend Christmas in Switzerland. I hate snow. I hate mountains. When I was about seven, I used to enjoy coming down a staircase on a tea-tray. Later, I used to like tobogganing down a snowy Surrey hill. I learnt to skate in 1916, pushing a chair round a flooded and frozen croquet lawn in Dundee, and have not skated since. In Switzer- land one does not toboggan, I am told, or skate holding on to a chair. Ski-ing, they say, is the thing. I do not think 1 should be good at it and feel sure it is too late to try. But what fills me with even greater alarm is the 'apt-es-ski' life: drinking hot wine in hot night-clubs with hot German girls in hot sweaters doing the twist.
I should not like—this is a disgraceful admis- sion—to spend Christmas in a house with no ser- vants. Every Sunday that I am in London I have to make my own bed. I sleep very quietly on Sat- urday nights and creep out of my bed like a snail on Sunday mornings. A pat to the pillows, a quick tuck in and on with the bedspread. I should not like to make my bed five days running—still less to sleep in it the fifth night. And I am not a keen washer-up. I can be shamed into drying but it is a long Christmas this year, and I do not want to do it twenty times. I am not good at getting in the coals, though quite good at sawing up logs. I am very bad at pumping the water but ex- tremely good at going to the pub for cigarettes.
I am glad not to be spending Christmas with Lady Docker or Lady Dartmouth: I don't know them but they are my least favourite public figures. Or with that lady who can't tell butter from marge: is she called Dr. Summerskill? doubt if one would fare very well there.
My doctor wouldn't lei me spend a night under the same roof as John Gordon: reading his column gives me blood-pressure. I should not care to spend Christmas with Dr. Leavis—or, indeed, in Cambridge—but that does not mean I should like to spend it with the Snows (at the Château d'Antan). I admire Memento Mori and The Bal- lad of Peckham Rye but I should be terrified of Christmas with Miss Spark. I should not presume to go near Mr. Evelyn Waugh. I have no desire to approach Mr. Maugham. I should be amused to spend Christmas at Woburn, if somebody else were paying. I should rather like to spend Christ- mas with Godfrey Winn. I'm told he's not a bit like what you'd think: rumbustioUs, not a bit pi, singing bawdy naval songs in the voice of a Robe- son, and with a wonderful cook and good modern pictures. But, as I don't know him, the question does not arise.
I should not like to spend Christmas at Futon Hall or with Sir Albert Richardson or the Duchess of Argyll or Lady Munnings—or, still less, Lady Munnings's singing dog. In fact the more I think of the places where I am glad not to be spending Christmas, the more grateful I am to my beloved friends and their kind hospitality. How fortunate I am
One possibility I have left out because it is al- most too terrible to be thought of : I am glad not to be spending Christmas alone. Many are.
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