My father had many relatives, my mother had few. My father saw his relatives all year round. He saw his brothers in the pub every midweek evening that he went, and on Saturday afternoons. He saw his sisters when he called on them in their home on Sunday mornings. My mother visited her relatives, and her few friends, on midweek evenings-usually with me in tow as 'security'. Her most interesting women friends from when she was single had left the town when I was in still shorts and my sister was not yet walking, to live in cities like Manchester and Nottingham which were just distant place names to me at the time. They were moved on by how they retained their jobs locally when they married, and for them staying in work they had found work in different places far away, and dared themselves and their families to collectively uproot themselves and remake their lives.
Mother became a housewife when she married and part of my growing up was watching her accept close social horizons and tight limits being set on what she was allowed to do. From working the equivalent of a part time job on her allotments to earning pin money being paid to do laundry and ironing at home and return it by hand to local pensioners, and eventually working part time cash in hand in a junk shop, whatever the changes she was allowed to make, she was only allowed the change when it maintained the social and financial differentials with the people who always thought they were worth more than her who thought this discreetly, lest their thoughts look like some sort of unearned pride.
No part of the latter half of 1970's felt more like a retread/revisit of the 1950's than Christmas did. That was when I would most be treated as if I were about five years younger than I actually was, and be most obliged to follow mother's example of trying to invest cheapness with a grandeur it would not sustain. This often meant me following her around at her command, and carrying things for her, lest unsupervised, I should do something she thought the neighbours would think ill of.
For not having gone to school locally I had no friends of my own age. I was only just getting half comfortable with being a member of my local library in my own right, and reading literary books with serious themes in them. If there had been a youth club that I could have joined then I would have joined it. Though if I had joined the youth club then I could guess my parents responses 'There were no youth clubs around when I was seventeen. At that age I had been working for three years. I did not earn much and was expected to hand over most of the wage to help keep the house.'. That they once gave their time over to be so thoroughly used up, to achieve so little, would have been a paradox that I knew better than to point out, had they actually said that. And anyway by age seventeen/eighteen dad had been discharged from National Service training for having contacted tuberculosis, and was institutionalised on a TB ward for three years, not that he ever said anything about it.
Still, my reading, and learning without a teacher did not even teach me how haphazard my choosing what to read for myself could be, in terms of my misunderstanding what I was reading. But that Christmas I put my misunderstandings aside, and supported mother as she visited the local elderly and left off with them home made Bakewell tarts and mince pies, before she and I set off to going shopping for the family and three pensioners. I followed Mother to the shops as people bought goods as if, come the day of celebration, they would be left short. Whilst they knew there would be surpluses that they could not share because their friends and neighbours had their surpluses too.
Maybe it was the cheapness of what was being sold that made it fly off the shelves, and into shopping trolleys, as if the goods had had wings. But the height of the cheapness that did not fly well with me was mother writing and preparing all the cards for hand delivery to all the relatives and her friends. This meant signing cards for dad when the cards were for his relatives from the family, because one of many activities he refused to have anything to do with was the signing of birthday or Christmas cards. Maybe if there had been some alcohol based carrot, or reward, in the activity he would have been more inclined to pitch in. But mother accepted this devolving of tasks that represented the family to her with a stoicism and determination that might be admired if, beyond repetition, the point of the activity could be understood.
Dad had four brothers and five sisters, all of whom were older than him. By the 1970's all but one sibling had adult and married children. Mother had her parents, an aunt and uncle, one sister, and a nephew and niece, and the neighbours, women friends of old and fellow gardeners that she felt some particular mutuality towards. The list of cards for hand delivery was quite long and at the end the cards were grouped in piles by proximity of address. The plan was simple, I was to go out with her over several cold evenings and we were to deliver the cards addressed to particular blocks of terraced housing where nearly all these relatives and would-be friends lived. Some relatives were obviously in and depending how close she felt to them she would knock and say 'Hello' to the occupants, sure that with the call being unannounced the welcome would be brief. Block of terraced house by block, night by night we would go out and tramp the streets like lost Jehovah's Witnesses sharing our wintery warmth in the hope of a similar wintery response back.
Over forty years on from these goings on it is difficult to know what to say about the hand delivery of so many Christmas cards to so many of dads relatives that we saw only at one or two weddings each year, if then. These relatives seemed more detached, the more we saw of them. The best I can say now is that at the time it seemed like one way to feel attached to mother, by seeming busy in support of her. If the words 'Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year' ring hollow through repetition in the 2020's, as machines pump the words out to shoppers increasingly desensitised to what the words once meant sincerely, and if grouchy people get tinsel allergy every time they go out of their front doors, then it was always thus,
Perhaps there was a secret grace, a hidden nobility, to enduring the fake sincerity, and the Christmas card routine was genuinely better than how my dad behaved one year that I was a teenager. He got himself so drunk that he passed out at drinking friends sheltered accommodation flat, the sort where it is frowned on to invite folks in to, particularly when the guest is drunk. The friend knew where dad lived, knocked on the front door when I was sat in his chair watching a black and white film, possibly a 1940's film directed by Orson Welles, on BBC 2, and dads tired but upright host requested my help to prop dad up one side, and get him to walk the ten minutes walk to the house.
I will never know if that was the height of him being open, and being trusting of others or there was a lack of intent. Dad tended to keep his life to be like an unsigned Christmas card,
