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Growing Up In Feltwell in the 1950s & 60s – Part – 9 Christmas Time
Christmas festivities began at school. In December at primary school we would practise our short Christmas concert to entertain mums and perhaps a few grandparents. Mrs Charlesworth would be on stage playing the piano while we each took it in turns to sing the same song to the audience: “I’m a little cowboy (or depending on sex and inclination, spaceman, soldier, fairy or nurse)...on the Christmas Tree – if you were a little boy (or girl!) would you like me?” That was it though we each did a little dance or mime appropriate for our allotted character while the class accompanied Mrs Charlesworth by singing : “Tra la la, la lah lah – tra la la la lah..!” We also made paper chains to decorate the classroom. One year Mr Feltwell suggested we stick little blobs of cotton wool to the windows to represent snow flakes using that brown glue used then for sticking paper. The result was lovely and it put us 10 year olds in an excited mood. (Not so the school cleaners: it took weeks for all the hard glue to be scraped off the glass.) By the time we were in Junior School the nativity play seemed part of the curriculum. One year a young student teacher made a wonderful donkey’s head from papier mâché which he painted to great effect. It caught everyone’s attention but it rather highlighted the fact that the rest of the donkey was missing.
One vivid memory as a young boy is of Dad taking just me to Swaffham Market one Christmas Eve late Saturday afternoon in c1955. Although the trip was ostensibly for me to buy mum a last-minute present (bath salts: “Ashes of Roses” from Boots) it may have been so Dad could do the same (perfume: “White Fire” in a tiny red bottle – also from Boots). Nearly all the stallholders had paraffin lamps hissing away; their faces were full of warm smiles while large coins held in fingerless mittens glistened in the festive glow. I also remember being taken by dad “to see” Father Christmas in Jermyn’s King’s Lynn department store where for a fee I was permitted to sit on his knee and tell him what I was hoping for on the big night. I was given a little present on account: a football fan’s sharp steel rattle.
At home we always had a real Christmas tree of course and the smell of them still takes me back to my childhood. Dad bought our first fairy lights second hand in 1958: each shade had a nursery rhyme illustration and they cast delightful shadows of the tree’s needles on the adjoining walls. But when one bulb blew others soon followed.
By the time I was 7 some of my friends no longer believed in Father Christmas. Fortunately, I still knew he was quite real. My eldest sister once declared that she and her boyfriend had passed him outside Auntie Betty’s house further down Munson’s Lane on their way home from Christmas Eve midnight mass. (Apparently he had only the one reindeer – not an entire team!). In 1957 when he brought me roller skates I discovered one of the leather foot-straps was missing. After inspecting them my clever mother suddenly exclaimed that “he must have dropped it on the pavement outside our house.” And sure enough, he had! Clear proof of his existence like that could last some time…. at least until the year when I bit a tiny hole in the skin of each orange in our fruit bowl on Christmas Eve and found the orange in my Christmas morning stocking had just such a tiny hole...
Until 1960 my aunt, uncle and cousins were living at Cambridge House in the High Street and aunt loved having Christmas parties for us children, almost as much as we did. My father’s sister was a lovely lady but like many who had lived through wartime frugality she could not understand how we could possibly want to eat our rabbit jellies and blancmanges, tinned peaches and evaporated milk without any bread and butter. Even when we had politely declined she would still try to coax us with “have just one small piece with your jelly Robert”. Odd because the special occasion food on her table was always plentiful. And her Christmas tree always held a present for each of us. I recall whistles with sticks inside them which varied the note as you blew and moved the stick in and out. She had a piano (lots of families did) and adults and children could play it to an acceptable standard for our games: Squeak Piggy Squeak; Pass the Parcel; Musical Chairs and Blind Man’s Buff. I’m not sure I recall the rules to Postman’s Knock but it did involve me at the age of 10 walking out of the room to deliver a kiss to 9 year old Vivien, waiting expectantly in the unlit hall. I was halfway through an apple when sent out and, on the spur of the moment, decided that I could avoid the mission’s messier part by applying my half eaten apple to Vivien’s cheek. She wasn’t fooled and she protested for the rest of the evening.
Before the breathalyser it was usual to ask in tradesmen such as the genial Mr Boyd our coalman, to have a glass of warm sherry or port. My family were friendly with the old and affable Fred King, the village road sweeper who at Christmas would bring us pink and white sugar mice (available from the Crown pub). He had a hoarse, rasping voice and often brought a huge tin of buttons of all shapes and colours, all picked up off the road while sweeping with his broom and handcart.
As we entered our teens Christmas became a little dull. Clubs and pubs were all closed in the evening on Christmas Day of course. Abandoned by Father Christmas and still unsullied by the pleasures of alcohol, around 8 o’clock four of us walked around a silent village with not even a dog barking to be heard. Television now ruled; everyone was indoors. Without any pre-planning, we lay down in the middle of the Beck just downhill from the post office, looking up at the stars and pondering the joys of Christmases still to come. We were there a good 5 minutes: it was quite mild. We would easily have heard had any car or motorbike approached- but there were none.
A few years later Bob, Alistair and I had passed our driving tests and had joined Thetford Young Farmers. The Bell Hotel there was a smart establishment in the 1960s and we were now young men and in the company of some smart young women. Those teenage years had slipped away so quickly, just as my wistful party aunt had told me they would but Christmas with a beer in hand (or a rum and black or bianco and lemonade) and in the company of your best friends, really wasn’t so bad. Then afterwards, perhaps midnight mass at a candlelit St Cuthberts Church, before departing back to Feltwell and family.
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