THE CHRISTMAS CARD
Do you remember the time when
sending Christmas cards was a pleasure and not a duty? How long ago now? Back in the days when even the cheapest Christmas card still
cost more than the stamp you used to send it?
When it was cheaper to send them in unsealed envelopes and (because it
still seemed to snow at Christmas in those days) you'd find half of the cards
had the tucked-in flap stuck all over the robin or the stagecoach, sodden as
they were from being carried around in the postman's hands.
That was when I met
him. My last year at university. A pre-Christmas party. Cold, of course, though the fire in the
grate was coal - before the Clean Air Acts, you see, so winter had a very
distinctive smell. Not that there was
very much coal around, anyway. Still
steam-trains, and sometimes they would run out of fuel halfway to their
destinations. Maybe that was why I
never bothered to actually go and see him - the rail journey from Oxford to
Cambridge was difficult enough, without the chance of being stranded in
Bletchley for want of a couple of bags of nutty slack.
But I remember very well
standing there with my back to the fire (third years could get away with
monopolising the heat-source), sipping British Sherry (which I then thought
very daring, and now find quite disgusting) and talking nineteen to the dozen
to Simpson from Keble. That was how he
was introduced to me. It was years
before I ever knew his first name. I
never asked him, of course. It's the
kind of question we English avoid.
Especially those of us with a certain kind of education.
I think the conversation must have been about the Post-War
World (sorry about the capitals, but you know what I mean; it was the days when
we talked about Current Affairs and didn't mean who was sleeping with whom, the
days when we said the Press and not the media, the days when the Editor really
was the person who wrote the editorial).
If it wasn't that, then it was Benjamin Britten's operas (which I'd
never actually heard, let alone seen), or more likely the Late Beethoven String
Quartets, or T.S.Eliot. A serious
subject, anyway, because we were serious then, and believed in it all.
Whatever it was, he wrote
to me about it. Letters - I used to
write them then, long-hand (I bought a type-writer for the thesis, Underwood
portable, the patent-dates ran up to February 1924, only three rows of keys and
two shifts, one for the figures and the semi-colons, made a noise like a
carpet-factory) - long-hand on large sheets of paper, and I couldn't quite
disguise the way the ends of my lines sloped down (pessimism, said The
Home Graphologist). Quite a
lot of them were to girls. I even had
answers. But my letters were the
self-intoxicating kind, and theirs were the chatty diary, so nothing came of
it. Letters - the title on the volumes
at the end of The Works.
Simpson started The
Correspondence. He wrote as he
spoke. I could hear his voice and the
little chuckle he used as a punctuation mark, I could see the quirky gestures
(like Muffin the Mule on an off-day) that he used to cover his embarrassment at
having made a rather good point. He
debated well, but he didn't want to win, he wanted to discover the truth. Sorry, The Truth. No, that's not fair: he didn't believe there was just one,
though he did believe that all the different truths were connected in some way.
I wasn't as thrilled about
his letter as I was about the one from Jane or the one from Elizabeth, or as I
would have been about the one from Ros if it had ever come, which it didn't. But I answered it because it interested
me. It actually spoke to me, in a way
which Jane's account of waiting at a bus-stop in the rain didn't. When I wrote back to her, or Liz, or Ros
(that's right, I was very persistent), I tried to be witty, fascinating,
effervescent, charming - I tried to make up in writing for all the defects that
I was secretly convinced I had in person.
Well, I thought Wright's Coal Tar was a great advance in
subtlety over Lifebuoy.
The concept of B.O. was a product of commercial television and the
Natural Break. I thought after-shaves
were for using after you shaved, so all my care in selection was put into the
choice of adjectives.
But Dear Simpson got it
straight from the head, always the more reliable part of me.
He also got it from the
spleen. I could swear, curse, invent
elaborate infernal punishments for my tormentors within the college (especially
the Members of Faculty I encountered when I was doing my doctorate), sometimes
rivalling Dante in ingenuity and certainly outdoing him in obscenity - though
always veiled in implication, because Simpson was old-fashioned in some
matters, but old-fashioned enough to know and understand a lot more than he
thought it proper or effective to express in so many words.
Time passed. Postage
increased. I left Cambridge - Simpson
had not been Simpson of Keble for quite a while - he was a schoolmaster,
Simpson of Worksop, Simpson of Mansfield, Simpson of Glossop. Suddenly there were two names at the bottom
of the letter. I had been away over
the summer, still young, still free, the Summer Vac was still the Long Vac
(these were the days before you didn't dare to go away for more than a
fortnight, in case you came back to read in the Higher Ed Supp that they'd just
abolished your department). I'd
noticed that the letters had been getting thinner. During that summer, while I'd walked over the Alps in Hannibal's
tracks (though of course the Swiss had long since cleared away all the elephant
droppings), Simpson had Taken the Plunge.
I'd been invited. The next
letter invited me again - but this time, to their home. In between, there was a postcard of Colwyn
Bay, looking towards Rhyl. In a way, I
was glad that I'd taken a déclassé intellectual's stand against Holiday
Postcards that I associated with my parents' generation and two wet weeks in a
seaside boarding-house. Quotations
from Livy about the Punic Wars, and a view of the St Gotthard, are not the sort
of thing to ask a Welsh postman to deliver to a honeymoon couple.
Now, of course, I can
admit that I was scared. But then, I
was disappointed that Simpson of Keble was neglecting the ramifications of the
Suez crisis to tell me that there were curtains up in the spare room and that
the new single bed was waiting to be christened. His wife had added a couple of lines herself, and I didn't need The
Home Graphologist (still my mother's favourite reading) to tell me they
weren't suited.
My way of facing up to
problems has always been not to. I
could have rung them, and offered my congratulations, but telephones still had
the black substantiality of a bakelite
coffin and the coinboxes gave you two chances of getting your money back,
including the Thought Better of It button, if you didn't like the sound of the
voice that answered. So I spent a
resentedly large amount of time on choosing a card that wasn't so tasteless as
to offend me and wouldn't be so tasteful as to offend her, and then just
relegated the pair of them to The Christmas Card List.
Once a year, you
communicate. Once a year, you face up
to the previous twelve months, which previously you've only had to live through
and experience and endure, and not, thank God, had to think about. Once a year, you find out who's died, who's
been born, who's married, who's divorced, who's moved - and always too late to
avoid saying or sending the wrong thing.
It's a heavy decision, taking somebody off the list - like that scene in
Julius Caesar, where the triumvirs are deciding who's
going to die: 'Lo, with a spot I damn him!'
A blob beside the name, and they're gone. Down among the 'limbo files', as it says on my
word-processor. For a few years, the
crossed-through name lingers on, until the old list gets so tatty and illegible
that you have to make a new one.
Simpson never ran that
risk. His card always turned up, to be
subjected to an aesthetic and sociological analysis by me, and, in later years,
my wife, whose curiosity about him ('The only person from those days you're still
in touch with') I refused, by dint of lethargy and forgetfulness, to
satisfy. If we were passing near him
on our way to or from a holiday, it was always too late or too early, or I
didn't have the address or the phone number.
My wife is a great reader of Sherlock Holmes, and always claims first
crack at the Christmas cards - quality of envelope, quality of design, names on
the card (pets? kids? aged relatives?), nature of the handwriting (age, health,
mental and emotional state) - she doesn't need The Home Graphologist
for that (which is just as well, since it's under a heap of junk in the garage,
where it's been for the past five years since I cleared out my mother's house
after she died).
Together, we followed the
Simpsons (George and Marjy) and their family history. The dogs, the cats, the kids, came and went. The text on the cards was sparse: 'Good
hols, the usual place', lists of diseases, names of cars, changes of
address. The sub-text was richer and
more disquieting. My wife was convinced
that Marjy drank - she claimed to have noticed a ring-mark. I felt that Simpson of Rastrick, as he had
now become, was just stifling in provincial mediocrity. We both felt that the marriage was probably
unhappy.
We may, of course, have
been wrong. One year, his was the only
name, and the writing was very shaky.
I didn't know what to think, and I didn't know what to do. Simpson of Keble, divorced? At his age? Widowed? If so, why
didn't he say? I'd told him about my
parents' deaths, I wasn't scared of these things, no reason why he should be,
either - the right sort of education enables you to face up to disasters. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to
write and ask him - delicately - what had happened.
I got the reply with the
following Christmas card, but it was uninformative: 'long illness, bravely
borne', you know the sort of thing.
The handwriting was all over the place.
By now, we had the Christmas list as labels on the word-processor. It left me much more time to give the cards the personal touch - or do I mean The Personal Touch? I urged him to come to us on a visit - drop in, if passing - a phone-call - I had as much success with Simpson as I had had with Ros.
The following year, the
card and the envelope didn't match in size, and my wife had a strong suspicion
that the card itself was re-used - a name had been scrubbed out, and either
that meant he didn't know who he was writing to, or it was one that had been
sent to him, and for lack of funds or lack of organisation he was sending it on
to us. We feared the worst.
This Christmas just gone,
there was no card. My wife didn't
notice, but I did. Simpson had always
sent his early. I knew he wouldn't
fail. I waited deliberately in the
mornings, and made myself late. I
found excuses to come home to lunch.
In the evening, I peered through the front-door at the mat before I put
the key in the lock.
On Christmas Night, about
one o'clock in the morning, I got up because I couldn't sleep - indigestion, cramp,
I don't know - and on the way back from the bathroom I glanced down at the
hall, and there was a card on the mat.
Even from the top of the stairs, I could recognise Simpson's rather
florid capital R. When I got there,
rather breathless, I realised it was just the light from the street-lamp
falling through the panes of the door.
The card came just before
New Year. It was our own, come back
again, thanks to the little gold address sticker. On the front, across Simpson's address, was an official label
about the reasons for non-delivery.
The box they had ticked was 'Recipient deceased.'
His daughter rang us a couple of weeks later. She told me her married name, which I
instantly forgot. She said her father
had been very ill lately, and had died in the middle of writing his Christmas
cards.
Is that the sort of
ghost-story you want? Whose ghost?
Mike Rogers
3.10 - 5.30
p.m. 30.x.91