This isn’t really a Christmas story, but it is a real memory of my childhood in Wales during a Christmas long ago. It’s one of a series of stories I’ve written this year for my grandchildren called Tales from Wales.
At its heart, Christmas for all of us is about the human glue of love and forgiveness sprinkled with joy. It’s also about creating memories. Hopefully, your memories are joyful, but sometimes they can be painful. Mostly, our Christmases are silly and quaint. We’ll talk about this stuff again next year. Meanwhile, I hope you all have a joyful, slightly silly and memorable Christmas.
In 1963, the Big Freeze arrived.
Temperatures dropped so low that all the ponds, rivers and lakes froze solid, and even the sea froze in some parts of Wales.
After Christmas Day, snow fell for four days straight until it was knee-deep outside our back door. My dad Walt and brother Jim had to dig a path with Mum’s dustpan and the shovel from the coal fire to get to the shed where there was a proper big spade.
I went and found the little tin spade I used to make sandcastles at the beach to help Jim and Walt dig away the snow. I even made a little cubby house like an igloo out of the piled-up snow outside our back door. I climbed inside and looked out at Mum cooking dinner through the kitchen window. It felt strangely safe and warm in my icehouse.
All the roads were blocked with thick snow, and parked cars became blobs of coconut icing on the new landscape. Even big lorries disappeared under the white-out.
There was no postman, no milk delivery, no coal man, Mr Rhys the grocer never came, and we never saw Tom the rag and bone man for weeks.
We couldn’t get to the shops, and school was closed because nobody could get there.
But the best thing was the hill outside our house – the snow had frozen solid, and the street was like a giant ski slope. You could only walk up it by holding on to garden fences and pushing your feet out sideways. Kids began coming from miles around with dustbin lids, tyre inner tubes, cushions and tarpaulins to slide down our ice mountain.
One day, my pals Geraint and Cellan turned up with proper toboggans their dads had made.
Geraint’s was made out of metal pipes bent into a curve with a sheet of wood on the top to lie on. It took him ages to pull it to the top of the hill.
Then he lay on it, pushed his feet into the ice and zoomed down the hill, holding on and thrashing about over the bumps like a puppet getting an electric shock.
He would have kept going, but he crashed into a car covered in snow. Cellan’s toboggan was just a wooden box on an old door, but it still went pretty fast.
I didn’t have anything, but an idea came to me when I saw a kid with a battered oil drum lid.
Mum always brought out a metal tray painted white with flowers on it when Aunty Dot and her friends came around for a cup of tea and pancakes. She used it on Boxing Day to pass around a plate of turkey slices and stuffing. She kept it in a cupboard under the sink, but I knew she’d never let me use it to slide down the hill, so I had to work out a way of getting it without her knowing.
So, I went home and hid in the hallway while Cellan and Geraint knocked on the front door to get Mum out of the kitchen.
When she opened the front door, I snuck into the kitchen, opened the cupboard and grabbed the tea tray while she was talking to the boys.
Then I went out the back door and met them on the ice slope with my flowery tea tray.
The plan worked perfectly, and I blasted down the hill even faster than Geraint on his real toboggan, which made him a bit mad. I was so fast even the other kids stopped to watch me zoom over the ice, sitting upright on my tea tray like a penguin riding a bullet.
I was a real hero until I fell off the tea tray, rolled to the bottom of the hill, slid under a white blob, and hit my head on the car exhaust. The tea tray with flowers on it flew over Mr Davies’ garden wall and clattered over the edge of the hill down into the town below.
The snow was spattered red with blood from my cut head, and Geraint ran to get my brother Dave, who was up in his bedroom studying for his senior school exams.
Dave came out, and so did Mum. She dabbed my head with orange iodine, which stung like a bee sting and smelled like toilet cleaner.
Mum said I was a silly boy and asked where her tea tray was.
I was going to say, “What tea tray?” but I knew that she knew I’d stolen it.
My head hurt, and I’d lost Mum’s tea tray, and now there was a crowd around us with older boys and girls staring at me.
I felt terrible about Mum’s tea tray, and I thought I was about to cry when Mum hugged me and took me back inside the house. She asked Cellan and Geraint to come in from the cold and made pancakes for all of us.
She served them on an old brown oven tray, and she never mentioned the white tea tray with flowers on it ever again.