A Real Christmas Present

 This hub was written in response to the question ‘Describe a time when you have helped an elderly person, which was asked by dwilliamson  on http://hubpages.com/request/12411/

The year was 1958 and I was around 12 years old and the time of year was about ten days before Christmas. It was bitterly cold and my friend Joan and I had gone out around the neighbourhood Carol singing. The Neighbourhood was a working class area in the city of Nottingham called the Meadows consisting mainly of back to back two up two down terraced houses.

At this time it was quite usual in terraced houses to either have plain floorboards or a square of lino on the floor with maybe a home made peg rug in front of the fire. There was a mixture of people ranging from poor to very poor living in the area but living in this area where everyone was pretty much the same in the same boat as you and living the same way we didn’t realized we were poor we thought we just tthought that we were normal.

My friend and I had been out a couple of hours and had some success caroling, in those days they expected two or three full carols for their money, sometimes stipulating which carols they wanted to hear. We had collected around four shillings in thruppenny bits pennies and halfpennies which we were well pleased with. We were on the last few houses that we were going to carol at because we were getting cold and the Fish and Chip shop was beginning to call us now that we had money in our pockets. Joan and I had visions of wrapping our cold little hands around a 4d (4 pence old money) bag of hot chips wrapped in newspaper with lashings of salt and vinegar on. If I had a time travel machine that Fish and Chip shop would be one place that I would revisit for sure.

It was the second house in a terrace of houses we went to the back door and began to sing after singing two or three carols we started singing ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’ to signal to the house holder that we had come to the end of our carol singing and as we got to the part ‘Glad tidings we bring to you and your kin’ we began to knock on the back door. The back of the house was in total darkness and at first there was no response so we went through the 'We wish you a merry Christmas' refrain again and knocked once more. From inside came a voice telling us that the back door was open and asking us to come in.

Downstairs in these particular houses there were only two rooms the back kitchen where the cooking, eating and much of the day to day living was done and the front room which was kept for special occasions. The back kitchen was in darkness but we could see a light shining through the cracks of the inside of the door frame so we made our way to the front room door and opened it. There sat a very old lady wearing an old overcoat and blanket wrapped around her legs she was hunched over a fire grate that had only the tiniest of embers glowing throwing out little or no heat at all. She wanted to give us a 1d but she looked so frail and cold that we told her we were only out to wish people a Merry Christmas and that we weren’t collecting money. 

The place looked very untidy and from the light shining through the doorway into the back kitchen we could see that there were dirty pots and dishes cluttering up the draining board of the sink and the table. We asked if there was anything that we could do before we left and she asked if we could fetch some coal in from the coalhouse outside so Joan and I went into the backyard with the coal bucket and opened the coalhouse door.  It was very dark out in the back yard but even so it soon became clear that there was hardly a shovel full of coal in the coal house and what there was consisted of very small pieces and coal dust, my dad would have called it slack. We would us slack at home to bank up our fire so that it would smolder overnight until you gave it a poke with a poker in the morning and it would burst into life once again. Joan asked if she could make the lady a cup of tea she said please that would be lovely, it was clear to us that she had difficulty moving about.

Joan went into the back kitchen and filled the kettle with water and put it on the gas stove only when she tried to turn the gas on there was no gas the meter had run out of money. In those days most people in working class homes paid for their gas and electricity using a coin meter which you fed using a shilling we asked the lady if she had got any shillings to feed the meter with, she replied that she hadn’t but not to worry she wasn’t that thirsty.

Joan and I had a quick confab and decide that we would do something about this, we told the lady we would be back shortly and we went to my house which was not far away and we got my mum to change two shillings of our carol singing money into one shilling coins so we could feed her gas meter then we filled a coal bucket with coal from our coalhouse (my dad was a coal miner so we always had coal) the old lady's room looked so miserable without a fire roaring in the grate.

I went back to the house and I fed the Gas meter the two shilling pieces that we had exchanged for our carol singing money and then I revived the old lady's fire soon it was burning brightly and throwing out lots of heat. Meanwhile Joan came back to the old lady's via the Fish and Chip Shop where she had picked up three sixpenny mixes, a mix is a portion of chips and mushy peas. Mushy peas is a working class delicacy that is popular in the Midlands and North of England and almost unheard of elsewhere, if ever you see them do yourself a favour and try them they are lovely with mint sauce. I made the tea and we three sat in front of a warm fire drinking hot tea and eating our chips out of the paper which is the best way to eat chips.

Joan and I had about 6d left from our night of carol singing but we got such a good feeling from seeing this old lady so happy. I think that was the best bit of that Christmas for both Joan and I and we got far more enjoyment spending our time and money that way than by stuffing ourselves silly with sweets and chocolate.

The old lady was not so much happy because of the things that we had bought and done for her though she was happy and grateful for those things, but for her the real Christmas present was the fact that we cared enough to do something for her. For her it was plain to see that the things came a long way behind the joy she got from our visit just like we got far more out of the tears of joy that the old lady shed as we talked and ate our chips round the warm fire with a now very happy old lady.

The cost? One bucket of coal free because I took it out of our coal house, two shillings for the gas meter, and one shilling and sixpence for the three sixpenny mixes all together three shillings and sixpence. The value of three happy people enjoying each others company priceless.

That Christmas all three of us got a real Christmas present

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