24
It was Christmas Day and we were all seated in the
drawing room around the large Christmas tree against the substantial base of
which all the presents that the house-parents had bought and wrapped for the
children in their care were piled up in such fashion that, with one glance, you
knew they had gone to no little trouble in so presenting them that they
appeared as though deriving from the tree itself, like so many nuts or seed
pods or other offerings from its copiously-bedecked bauble-laden branches.
As it happened, it was early afternoon and we
had just eaten Christmas dinner in the dining room across the hallway and
generally put ourselves into a receptive and grateful frame-of-mind, glad to
have got this far without undue mishap or serious regret. I must have been
about twelve or thirteen at the time, but there were others in this all-boys
Children's Home who were younger still, maybe eight or nine, with a markedly
more excited and expectant air, as though on tenterhooks for 'Father
Christmas', either the male house-parent or, on this occasion, his stooped
father who, even without a fiery red gown and pair of high boots that must have
been dragged out of hibernation in some remoter part of the house, somehow
looked the part, what with his white beard and twinkling eyes and other
well-known trademarks of Santa Clause.
Today it fell to him to dispense the presents
to each of the boys as he read out the name dangling on a card from whichever
of the well-wrapped presents he happened to have chosen from the huge pile
under the tree, presents which, experience had taught me, the house-parents had
done their best to match to the particular tastes or character or age of each
one of us, whether younger, like Derek, a curly-haired kid who sat cross-legged
on the floor no more than three yards from the Christmas tree, or older, like
myself and one or two of the others who had managed to grab one of the
armchairs that stood in a semi-circle to either side of it.
Both the senior house-parents, who happened to
be husband and wife, were seated in their customary places, the one opposite
the other, and if memory serves me there were also a couple of junior
house-parents in the room, neither of whom, being spinsters, were married, even
though they were of marriageable age and one of them, in particular, was
passably attractive, despite having a slight limp. Old 'Father Christmas', as
we shall call the male house-parent's father, bearing in mind that he was only
standing-in for a symbolic figure, was well into the distribution of presents
by now, and as each boy's name was read out, whether punctuated by a roguish
chuckle or supplemented by an involuntary and possibly knowing grunt, an eager
hand would reach for the proffered parcel which, on being shyly or even boldly
accepted, was then stashed away at the individual's feet or, if he already
happened to be on the floor, just in front of him, so that instead of being
distracted with the business of tearing them open every boy and sometimes a
house-parent was as soon ready to receive the next parcel in like vein as he
had been to take the previous one, keeping 'Santa' on his toes, as they say,
and certainly on his high-booted feet for the duration of a process which,
given the large numbers of presents involved with the multiple distribution to
sixteen or so persons, including the house-parents, could prove quite demanding
and invariably pretty time-consuming, time being something which 'Father
Christmas', in no way analogous to 'Father Time', seemed to be in short supply
of as he busied himself with this present and that, holding the label up close
to his dim-sighted eyes in order to accurately decipher the name on it and then
either shuffling over to the person concerned or, if this proved unnecessary,
simply handing it out to him before returning, with stooped back, to the foot
of the tree to retrieve the next one his hands happened to alight upon until,
by and by and with a sort of inexorable logic, the pile of presents stretching
right around the banked-up base of it began to diminish and the pile either in
front of or at the feet of each of the eager recipients, whether adult or
juvenile, to grow correspondingly larger until, with several such piles on the
floor alone, never mind tables and chairs, there was scarcely any room for him
to manoeuvre in, let alone for us to stash our presents.
In the meantime, Derek had become well-nigh
hypnotized by the pile of brightly-wrapped presents that had gradually built up
in front of him, and it was as much as he could do to contain his excitement
and, what's worse, lust for receiving. Fortunately for 'Santa' there were now
fewer parcels for him to distribute, and he must have been looking forward to a
well-earned rest, to be able to take his boots of and put his feet up somewhere
else, especially since he was, appropriately enough, no spring chicken but, as
the father of an adult himself, quite elderly and not a little infirm.
Soon, however, the last of the
carefully-wrapped gifts would be handed out to somebody in the assembled
throng, since it only remained for a couple of us to enable him to complete his
task by thanking him, with good-natured irony, for his seasonal generosity, the
product, as I well knew, of several days if not weeks preparation on the part
of each of the house-parents who, now that proceedings were drawing to a close,
would have the satisfaction of witnessing the joy and pleasure on the faces of
those boys in particular who, being comparatively new intakes to the Home, had
not experienced such an event before and would not, in all likelihood, have
encountered anything similar outside the framework of care into which
circumstances had perforce thrust them.
Up till this point that joy and pleasure would
have gone some way towards recompensing the house-parents for their efforts,
though they were further compensated by the presents which they had bought and
wrapped for one another and which some of the older boys, including myself, had
managed, in spite of straitened circumstances, to buy for them as well, making
for some degree of reciprocal emotion. With what sounded like a sigh of relief,
old 'Father Christmas' had just distributed the last present, as it happened a
quite large one, to the younger and prettier of the two junior house-parents,
who graciously accepted it with a giggle of surprise.
Now it was at this juncture that young Derek,
who was still sitting cross-legged on the floor not more than a couple of yards
from me, kind of snapped out of his trance or spell and cried out, apparently
in all innocence of any Dickensian connotation: Is that all? The question,
which evidently referred to the presents, was not addressed to anyone in
particular, not even the retreating 'Father Christmas', and it took a moment or
two for its disappointed tone to penetrate the general hubbub of excited
expectancy at the prospect of our now being able to actually open the presents
and discover what the wrappings were intended to conceal. But when it did there
was a sudden hushed silence, as though in shocked disbelief, and it wasn't long
before the female senior house-parent, unable to regard this question as a joke
or to dismiss it as of small account, shouted back: Derek! in a tone at once
deeply censorious and bitterly disillusioned.
The senior male house-parent had also come
around, as if by a prompt, to her point of view and, filled with a sudden rage,
rushed out of his armchair to grab the unfortunate boy by the ear and wrench
him to his feet, preparatory to dragging him from the room and, even before
they had reached the door to the hall, administering not one but several smacks
in quick succession to what I presumed for I could not see from where I sat
and felt, in any case, somewhat reluctant to look was the back of his legs,
since one could hear the sharp sound of a large thick-fingered hand on naked
flesh followed by a renting of the air by high-pitched shrieks of pain which
burst from Derek's mouth at the ferocity of his chastisement, a ferocity which
may well have impacted on his buttocks as well. It was all too much for the
senior male house-parent to be confronted by such ingratitude, such naked greed
and lust for more from a boy who had had no shortage of presents in front of
him and appeared not to realize how much effort they, the house-parents in
general, had gone to, psychologically as well as physically and financially, to
provide a sufficiency of presents for some twelve boys of different ages and
four if not five (if we are to include 'Father Christmas' himself) adults.
Meanwhile, Derek's shrieking continued to
poison the atmosphere, even from the hall and the dreaded front office that had
once been a dentist's surgery but in the context of this Children's Home had
usually functioned as a kind of punishment cell into which miscreants were
vigorously hauled to be summarily interrogated and/or chastised, and now we sat
in our various places as though frozen with embarrassment, unable to fully
comprehend the enormity of the situation and why, on this day of all days, the
celebration throughout Christendom of Christ's birth, the hope and happiness of
a few minutes' ago had now been eclipsed by fear and woe, even by a sense of
panic and helplessness that, as a boy in care, anything could happen at any
time of the day or night to shatter the illusion of family security, of social
well-being, and cause one to feel conscious of just how vulnerable one was to
be in such a position, to be a child who, with the smallest of psychological or
social slips, a failure to meet fire-drill criteria in the middle of the night
or to get out of bed when roused at 6.45 to do housework before breakfast,
could be subjected to the grossest uncaring brutality and made to feel guilty
for just being alive, the product of some miscarriage of familial justice that
had caused a social problem the solution to which necessarily required exceptional
measures.
Derek was now, alas, the catalyst of our
communal woe as we struggled to return to the customary Christmas Day
atmosphere and, with tentative moves towards opening our presents, carry on as
if nothing unusual or unexpected or indecent had occurred, even though any real
semblance of the Christmas spirit had now dispersed and we were once again
confronted by the existentialist horror of our earthly lot in the care of
persons who, despite the best of intentions, were not our real parents and had
no reason to love us or to regard us with anything but a cold professional
contempt. This, sad to say, was one Christmas that none of us especially not
Derek would never forget!
LONDON 2013
