everyone’s door in the yard and ask them if they had ‘anything spare’ for the bring-and-buy stall. None of our neighbours liked giving anything away, materially or otherwise, and by the time I had reached the Christmas’ house I remember feeling completely demoralised. After two hours of knocking and being polite, all I had had to show for my efforts was a bunch of dog-eared back issues of the People’s Friend, two tins of sliced pineapples, a toilet brush cover in the shape of a crinoline-clad lady, whose expression was surprisingly cheerful considering she had a lav brush up her arse, and a scratched LP entitled ‘Golden Memories; Rock’N’Roll Love Songs with the Hammond Singers’. (And even that had been difficult to prise away from Sandy, until she had remembered it had belonged to her ‘ex-bastard’, as she called him, and flung it at me with a flourish.)
Worse still were the women’s expressions when they had opened up their back gates expecting to see Uncle Alan and found me instead. Uncle Alan was the nearest thing we had to a sex symbol in a ten-mile radius. He seemed ancient, at least twenty-eight, but he did have chestnut brown curly hair, a huge smile, an obscene amount of energy and a huge dimple right in the centre of his chin which looked like someone had got a pencil, placed it on his skin and slowly twirled it round and round on the spot. (I knew this because I had spent many a happy hour creating dimples in my arms using this very method.) We kids always braced ourselves if we saw him bounding across the yard from the vicar’s house, eager and slobbery as a Labrador, because we knew he’d be looking for volunteers for another of his good-egg schemes. ‘Well littl’uns!’ he’d gasp, rubbing his hands together in what he thought was a matey, streetwise kind of manner. ‘How about we get together and do something about this litter, eh?’ And the next thing you know, you’d be wearing one of his canvas aprons with ‘Tollington Methodist Times’ plastered all over it and picking up fag butts from underneath parked cars.
But we never said no; though we would rather die than admit it, we actually enjoyed trailing after him, gathering blackberries for the ‘Jam In’, washing down the swings in the adjoining park with Fairy Liquid, even sitting in on his Youth Chats every Sunday afternoon, in which we’d have two minutes of talk vaguely connected to Jesus and then get on with making up plays or drawing pictures or playing ‘Tick You’re It’ in and around the pews. Frankly, there was nothing else to do, as many of us were not privy to the big boys’ leisure activities which were mainly cat torturing or peeing competitions behind the pigsties, and he knew it.
‘Oh I could give him one,’ Sandy had once said to Anita’s mother, Deirdre, as they watched Uncle Alan leap across the yard. ‘Don’t he wear nice shoes? You can always tell a bloke by his shoes.’
‘Gerrof you dirty cow,’ said Deirdre. ‘He’s a vicar or summat. Yow wouldn’t get to touch him with a bargepole.’
‘He could touch me with his bloody pole anyday,’ said Sandy, dreamily, before both of them collapsed into screeching guffaws.
I had pretended not to hear this as I trailed after him with an armful of leaflets, but had mentally stored it away. At least I now knew what a sex symbol was supposed to look like, and could understand why I was considered a poor second choice when it came to donating bric-a-brac.
So by the time Mrs Christmas had reached her back gate, wheezing her way from her yard door, her slippers slapping the cobbles, I did not expect much of a booty. But she had swung the gate back and all I could see was her shock of white hair peeking over a huge armful of clothes she held in her hands.
‘Meena chick, I’ve been expecting you,’ she said. ‘Where do you want this lot?’
I had helped her pile the clothes into my wooden pull-along, parked at her gate (it had been an old play trolley of mine which used to be filled with alphabet building blocks. Perfect, my mother said archly, for door-to-door begging.) Mrs Christmas had straightened up carefully and I examined her face, rosy pink with delicate veins running from her huge nose like tributaries, surprisingly sparkling and deep blue eyes with an expression that made her look like she was always about to burst into laughter, or tears. She had looked healthy enough to me and I felt relieved.
‘You can have all this lot. I shan’t be needing it, chick. Not where I’m going.’
I had knelt down and rifled through the cart; there must have been at least a dozen dresses, all one-piece tailored frocks with baby doll collars, darted sharply at the waist, many of them with belts and full pleated skirts. But the fabrics, I could not take my eyes off them, all delicate flowers, roses and bluebells and buttercups set against cream silk or beige sheeny muslin, ivy leaves snaking around collars and cuffs, clover and mayblossom intertwined with delicate green stalks tumbling along pleats like a waterfall. It was as if a meadow had landed in my lap.
They were so different to the clothes my mother wore, none of these English drawing room colours, she was all open-heart cerises and burnt vivid oranges, colours that made your pupils dilate and were deep enough to enter your belly and sit there like the aftertaste of a good meal. No flowers, none that I could name, but dancing elephants, strutting peacocks and long-necked birds who looked as if they were kissing their own backs, shades and cloth which spoke of bare feet on dust, roadside smokey dhabas, honking taxi horns and heavy sudden rain beating a bhangra on deep green leaves. But when I looked at Mrs Christmas’ frocks, I thought of tea by an open fire with an autumn wind howling outside, horses’ hooves, hats and gloves, toast, wartime brides with cupid bow mouths laughing and waving their hankies to departing soldiers, like I’d seen on that telly programme, All Our Yesterdays. And then I had glanced at Mrs Christmas’ saggy belly straining at her pinafore, the belly which even then had been growing something other than the child she said she had always wanted but never had, and I had wondered how she had looked when she had worn all these frocks and whether I would have recognised her.
Mrs Christmas had rummaged in the front pocket of her pinny and brought out a furry boiled sweet which she popped wordlessly into my open mouth. It tasted sooty and warm. Then she suddenly leaned forward and kissed me. She did not have her teeth in and I felt as if she was hoovering the side of my cheek. ‘You’ve always been a smashing chick, you have.’
My face felt damp and I wanted to wipe it but realised that would be rude, and at the same time, suddenly felt desperately, bitterly sad. I managed to mumble ‘Thank you, Mrs Christmas,’ through the sweet and stumbled out of the yard, tugging my now heavy cart behind me. I had not wanted to look back but I had to, and she was still watching me across the yard. She had waved her massive red hand and I had not seen her since.
Before I could ask out aloud if Anita had seen sight or sound of Mrs Christmas lately, Anita chucked the packet of sweets, still half full, to the ground and began running down the entry, whooping like an ambulance siren. The echo was amazing, deep and raspy and rumbling like a dinosaur’s cough, it bounced off the high entry walls and made me shudder. She stopped, panting for breath at the far end of the passage, a stick silhouette, seemingly miles away. ‘Yow do it. Goo on then.’
I took a deep gulp of air and began running, gathering speed, opened my lungs and bellowed, no pattern or tune, just pure sound swooping up and down the scale, so much of it I felt it was pouring out of my nose and ears and eyes. The echo picked me up and dragged me along the slimy walls, the harder I shouted the faster I moved, it was all the screams I had been saving up as long as I could remember, and I reached sunlight and Anita at the other end where we both laughed our heads off.
Suddenly a gate scraped open beside us and Mr Christmas emerged in his vest and braces, his face blue with fury. His hair stood on end, straight up like he’d put his finger in a socket, and there was drool gathering on one side of his mouth. ‘Yow little heathens! What yow think yow’m playing at?’ he hissed. ‘I got a sick woman inside. Yow think she wants to hear yow lot honking around like a lot of animals?’ He was pointing a shaky finger at his sitting room window, the one that overlooked the yard. Through it, just visible, was the top of Mrs Christmas’ snowy head. It seemed to be propped at an awkward angle, it looked like she was watching the tiny black and white telly sitting on top of the sideboard.
I felt mortified, more for not going to visit Mrs Christmas than for shouting down the entry,