24th December 1934
It was three o’clock in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, one of my favourite moments of the year. The last of the parcels was tied up in crepe paper and bright ribbon, the last of the cards was written, stamped and off to the late post, the sun was sinking, the fire crackling, and my little household was gathered in: Bunty curled at my feet, Donald and Teddy in the billiards room renewing their endless rivalry with a quick game before tea, Hugh in his library. The fact that my sister was spending Christmas with our brother in Northamptonshire and would not be swelling the family party with her dull husband, her doughy children or her dreary self, was not of my choosing. She had been invited and had declined. Therefore, I thought, I could be grateful without guilt.
Similarly, Hugh had decreed that since Donald and Teddy were now twenty and twenty-two – far beyond tales of Father Christmas – there was no need to trouble with a tree in the drawing room. He had always considered them vulgar things. “German, Dandy,” he started saying, when German became a slur, but he had been harrumphing for years before that.
If I chose to have a tree in my own sitting room then, I told myself, and if the twinkling candles and the beloved baubles and trinkets of their childhood brought the boys there to fling themselves into my armchairs and talk piffle with me, and if their father therefore missed their company, he knew where to find us.
I smiled at the sight of it there in its little brass tub, the parcels tucked around its feet like lambs around a ewe on a chilly day, then I turned as someone opened my sitting room door.
“Something wrong, Joan?” I asked. The tweenie, usually a blur as she sped around the house, was standing shifting from foot to foot on the edge of the carpet.
“It’s Mrs. Tilling, madam,” she said. Mrs. Tilling was my cook.
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