The Scaffolds were number one with Lily the Pink that Christmas and we had the first ‘proper’ white Christmas since 1938.

We moved in to the house on Hickinwood Lane on Christmas Eve 1968. It was a semi-detached council house on a row of ten such homes overlooking cornfields, pylons and the outer edges of a small wood where bluebells grew in the spring. The houses were brand new but at ₤5.00 a week they were considered too expensive for most prospective council tenants and half of them were still empty when we arrived.

I was seven years old and my brother, Gary, was three. We sat on a pile of mattresses in the back bedroom and watched the snow as it accumulated amidst the tangle of weeds that would eventually become our garden. It was late afternoon and already dark outside. There was no light bulb in the bedroom but the snow seemed to have a luminosity of its own and there was an unmistakable sense of excitement in the air that day; a new house, the snow and the impending arrival of Father Christmas.

That was probably the last year I believed in Father Christmas. I still believed that I had to be asleep before he would land on the roof of the house with his sack of toys, that if I heard his sleigh bells I had to keep my eyes tight shut otherwise he wouldn’t leave any presents for me. It was the one time of the year when real magic happened and it was impossible to sit still for too long.

Downstairs by the harsh, unprotected light of the 100w bulbs there was a crisis with the radiators and hot water was gushing all over the bare floorboards because the builders hadn’t capped the pipes. The house had ‘partial’ central heating which meant that the fireplace had a back boiler which heated the water to fuel the radiators during the day. Dad worked for the coal board so we got free coal once a month and this was stored in the coalhouse – a room with a latched door right by the kitchen entrance. It probably wasn’t many years after that when builders stopped making coalhouses but back then it was still an essential part of life if you lived in the Industrial North.

“Stoke the fire, duck,” Mum would say. And the scrape of the metal shovel against the concrete floor of the coalhouse was almost as satisfying as the weight of the glistening black chunks as they were carried gingerly through the kitchen, through the dining room and in to the living room fireplace. In the winter a shovelful of coal was always accompanied by a cold draft and a sharp smell of the outside; the kind of smell that lingers on damp coats and woollen mittens after you’ve built a snowman and come indoors for your tea.

The new house, with its partial central heating and downstairs toilet (a luxury considering we had a toilet in the bathroom upstairs as well!) was a far cry from the tythe cottage we’d just vacated in a small farming community called Sookholme. The old house had outdoor plumbing and no heating in the bedrooms. It had a whitewashed pantry inhabited by ants, a ‘back kitchen’ and a ‘front room’ and we only lived there for eight months so some of the rooms were never decorated. My one overwhelming memory of that house is the night I had diarrhoea and couldn’t get down the stairs fast enough to reach the outside lav. As I stood on the doormat, wriggling the key in the lock to get outside, my bowels got the better of me and their contents gushed down my pyjama legs and in to my slippers with alarming speed and efficiency. In my distress I rushed through the house, calling Mum to the rescue, leaving a fetid trail of shit from the back door, all the way through to the bottom of the stairs. “Mum, I’ve pooed on the carpet,” was my plaintive cry when she finally appeared on the landing in her nylon nightie.

“I’ve not got time to make any tea so it’ll have to be beans on toast,” said Mum when I enquired about food, “and it looks like we’re not going to have any heat tonight if your dad can’t mend the radiators so go and put your jumper on before you catch your death of cold.”
“When’s he going to put the tree up?”
Mum, standing on a chair with a length of Swish curtain track in her hand, sighed heavily and looked down at me with impatience. “Simon, I’ve told you before and I won’t tell you again, your dad’ll get round to it when he’s got time so stop mithering me!”
And so I went back upstairs and entertained my brother with a Popeye slide show on my Chad Valley projector, hoping that the batteries would last long enough to get us to the final scene.

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