The wonderful ghosts of Christmas past

The past shifts about like clouds, now dense, now parting for a memory to shine out, perhaps randomly, but bright as the sun.

Here is the Sheffield Christmas when I was four and slept in Great-Aunt Florence’s room, on an eiderdown beside her bed, in the terraced house that smelled of coal smoke — the Christmas of worrying about how dirty Santa must get, going up and down the sooty chimneys.

Home was Scarborough: the bracing sea air and howling gales where I missed the coal dust smell, though it brought back the cough I had had since nearly dying of whooping cough, aged two — the cough that has never really left me, so that many a Christmas since has smelled of Vicks, camphor, Friars’ Balsam.

The Sheffield Christmas was the spooky one, too, half-frightening, half-fascinating, when I hid under the table, with its long cloth, as my grandmother and great-aunts held a seance above my head. Women did that then, after losing so many of their men in two wars. Tea leaves, cards and palms were read as well; money and journeys over the water predicted.

There must have been Sheffield decorations, but I don’t remember any of those clearly, not until the Tinfoil Christmas, when my father came home on leave from the RAF and brought out of his kitbag a shining, mysterious, thing, a rolled-up thing. We say ‘I’ll never forget’ too glibly, but I never have forgotten, in 74 years, how this caught the light and shone. I had never imagined such a thing, but it was there, sitting in the middle of our table.

‘You might make something out of it,’ Dad said, and as she made something out of anything, my mother did, and showed me how easy it was.