Pilot Lights

I was so proud of them that I couldn’t walk properly. Not only because they were a little too big, but also because I couldn’t take my eyes off them. We were all together, it was late at night, and we were in the very heart of London. It was 1954, and we had taken the long bus ride up to the West End to see the first ever Regent Street Christmas lights. My parents were tutting about the rain, but I was in a young girl’s heaven, not least because the puddles conspired, together with my beautiful patent leather shoes, (an early Christmas present) to reflect and enhance the panoramic wonderland into which we had emerged. 

We wandered from Oxford Circus, past an endless spectacle of dazzling window displays, flaunting exotic gifts amid jaw-dropping automated tableaux. And the very air, usually sour and be-smogged, smelled of roasting chestnuts and popcorn with a tantalising top-note of sorcery. After years of blackouts and deprivation, fourteen years of harsh rationing, and a run of bitter foggy winters, poor drab and battered postwar London had finally taken the plunge to adopt some transatlantic-style Christmas pizazz. Oxford Street would not follow suit until 1959.

Our lengthy suburban Saturday pilgrimage terminated at the foot of the massive twinkling tree in Trafalgar Square. The first of these mighty spruce trees had been ceremoniously gifted to London in 1947 by the people of Oslo, in gratitude for Britain’s wartime support. Any due reverence was now wasted on me, as by this time, my precious Cinderella footwear had turned to blistering stone. Soon I was riding high on my father’s shoulders past Nelson and his pride of lions. I recall him telling me that each of these seven ton beasts would spring to life if Big Ben were ever to strike thirteen times. And no sooner had my tired and thoroughly bedazzled young brain explored and filed away this profound information, we were climbing into the warm rumbling low-lit embrace of the homeward bus. My young heart now headed home as thoroughly converted to the church of bling as it had already been beguiled some years previously by the fantasy philosophy of Disney.

In those days, Christmas wasn’t fully acknowledged until November was well over and done with.  About a week beforehand, I would perch at the kitchen table as my father cut up strips of paper - some hastily coloured - whilst I dobbed into a pot of thick white gloop that smelled of almonds to stick them together in loops. Mother, in olfactory harmony, would be rolling out marzipan made from the almonds my father had scrumped in the park at the end of summer, to ‘seal’ The Cake prior to the Christmas Eve icing procedure ( another job allocated to him in recognition of his plastering and engineering skills.) In a day or two, our home would suddenly be festooned by yards of wonky paper-chains and rapidly baggy balloons, and the leggy potted tree would be dragged indoors from the garden. Next, father would descend ceremoniously from the attic bearing an old box, stuffed with scritchy tarnished tinsel, brittle glass baubles, the endlessly repaired paper lanterns,, and strange snowmen crafted from cottonwool. Finally, Moody Mary the Fairy would be released, somewhat stunned, from her posh triangular box, in a shroud of crispy tissue paper. Her limbs and wings would be yanked into shape, and her star-wand inserted into a stigmata in her hand. She would then be tethered, often at a jaunty angle, to the top of the tree. Then, whilst I helped make the tea, our resident engineer would attend to the string of strange bakelite lanterns. Like all Christmas lights ever, they had built-in contrariness. Over the years, I would sit wide-eyed on the stairs to eavesdrop on this most genteel of men spluttering expletives over generations of fairy light malfunctions. But they were the final touch, the magical catalyst, that could - and would - dispel the dark and the chill of midwinter. Those and the candles that shivered at the draughty windows on Christmas Eve to commemorate absent souls and to guide in the exhausted reindeer.

Early in December last year, my son, whom on account of pandemic lockdown I had for too long seen in only two dimensions, made a fleeting solicitous appearance. My welfare assured, his secondary mission was to put up the lights along the river wall, and up into the old yew tree - lights that reflect to infinity through the conservatory windows, and that skitter on the waters below. There were a few subdued curses as he fought the tangles and the wind, which made this old heart tremble with glee. The night after he left, it began to rain. I lit a few early absentees’ candles and went upstairs to find my best purple patent leather boots.