More to say

Apologies to regular readers. The blog is being severely impacted by soul-destroying labour on my TEFL end-of-course assignment.  I've gone soft when it comes to this kind of thing.

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Our "English" family came together at our house at Christmas. We lived upstairs in an old oast-house. Out in the weald, the hop-fields were grey and an empty forest of poles, the ducks flew around the pond shrieking.

A day or two before, here came my grandmother on the bus, with her small brown suitcase and her presents wrapped in re-used wrapping paper. We went out into the garden with my mother and cut sprigs of holly with plenty of red berries on them.

Here too came my great-aunt, once a receptionist in Harley Street, and still with a certain brisk city air about her. She learnt to drive late in life, but not very well, and it was a relief when her small DAF automatic came through the winding lanes and chugged up against the garden gate without actually hitting it.

I and my sister --- I still had only one in those days --- had been taken Christmas shopping in Tunbridge Wells.

On Christmas Eve we had our "Swedish" Christmas, and then we opened the presents sent from Sundsvall. We sat around the tree, decorated with straw goats and straw tomtegubbar, and we also admired the snowy scene that my father set up on a bookshelf, where the figurines of priest and skiing angel and crib and bearded dwarf and horse-drawn sledge gathered together on a lumpy terrain of cotton wool. We ate herrings, boiled potatoes, and Christmas ham. At some point my mother would put the Swedish long-dance on the gramophone. It was a high-tempo medley beginning with Nu är det jul igen and proceeding through various other Christmas favourites. We joined hands in a chain and flew uproariously through every room in the house.


On Christmas Day we had the "English" Christmas: a proper roast, but more often a capon than a turkey. Just before dinner (it was really a sort of late lunch), the adults watched the Queen's Speech. My sister and I were, of course, more interested in examining the bright parcels under the tree and trying to guess what they might contain.

We never had cranberry sauce.*  We would have lingonberry sauce (sent over from Sweden), or my mum's home-made grape "jelly", rather delicious but runny. (The oast-house had an ornamental grapevine on its west wall.) 

In those days the family still kept up a pretence of drinking alcohol, something that no-one particularly liked, but considered an essential part of any celebratory meal. I learnt to let the red wine "breathe".

My sister and I were allowed wine with water. Often there was an adult conversation about how it was good to introduce children to alcohol early, so it lost its mystique. It certainly worked in our case, we drink about two units a year.

At the time, however, we were most enthusiastic. The most reluctant wine-drinker, even more reluctant than my mother, was my grandmother. But this was not because it was alcohol. My grandmother was always reluctant, even ungracious, when she was offered any kind of treat. Eventually she gave in.  I observed her behaviour closely, understanding that she was a much better person than the rest of us. Even today, I still have difficulty accepting a gift graciously.

Then we had Christmas pudding. My dad made "brandy butter" by whisking up butter in a dish with brandy. He also poured brandy over the pudding and set light to it, so that it flickered with blue flames when brought to the table. Inside the pudding he placed verious silver threepennies and other silver trinkets in the shape of wedding-bells or money-bags. Then he tried to ensure that everyone got a trinket in their slice of "pud". The trinket told your fortune. Now and then someone would choke or break their teeth on a trinket.

After dinner we went for a walk down the rutted lane between grey farmlands, the dog scampering ahead of us just as if it had no concept of Christmas, had not overeaten nor drunk wine, and this was merely another brilliant day.

Even so, the dog was not neglected at Christmas. My mother always bought it a new squeaky toy, and it was a joy for us the first time the dog made the toy squeak.

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*This was down to a sort of naive anti-Americanism.

We regarded "American" cranberries as very inferior to "true" cranberries, i.e. Swedish lingonberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea).  So far as the flavour is concerned, I still prefer lingon for meat dishes, it's much less sweet than cranberry. But our facts were wrong, because lingonberries are not cranberries, that is, they do not belong to the distinct cranberry subsection of Vaccinium. (There is a European cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus), a tiny shrub that grows on the surface of bogs, but how it compares in flavour to American cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon)  I don't know, and I should think it's impossible to harvest commercially, the fruit yield would be far too low.  European emigrants learned from Native Americans to harvest American cranberries, around 1550.

In the same chauvinistic vein we regarded American blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum etc) as extremely inferior to "true" blueberries, i.e. Swedish blåbär (Vaccinium myrtillus, known as bilberries or whortleberries in English). Once again, we had our facts wrong. European bilberries do not belong to the blueberry subsection of Vaccinium. Both kinds of berry are excellent but they are very different.  Bilberries are great for jams and pies, but fresh bilberries can only be used on a domestic scale, they do not keep well and the juice is extremely staining.  Fresh blueberries (now so ubiquitous, but a rare sight in Britain twenty years ago) proved to be a splendid, robust and versatile fruit. And they've deservedly stormed the pantheon of international supermarket fruits, to the great benefit of all our healths.