The Night Before Christmas Read online

  When they were all belly-up on the kitchen table with their necks dangling above the floor, my mother organised her plucking team. It was desirable that they should be plucked straight away as a warm goose was easier to pluck than a cold one. A big box was placed in the centre of the kitchen and we were all ranged around it as if we were conducting a seance. Each child had a goose and the strict instruction was not to tear the skin as this blemished the table presentation of the goose. Sometimes the feathers came freely, but invariably at some stage you hit a trouble spot when you felt that the poor goose was trying to hold onto its cover and protect its modesty. But my mother was intent on baring all, so each one of us stuck with our goose until we arrived at the soft downy feathers that wafted up our noses, causing us to sneeze and blow feathers in all directions. The pen feathers were the worst of all and slowly and laboriously had to be eased out one by one. My mother finished first and ended up with a smooth white goose as clean as a whistle with not a tear in sight. But from then on it was downhill all the way until the final goose, which had changed pluckers many times, ended up looking as if a third-rate plastic surgeon had done a rush job on her. Finally, when they had all been parted from their feathers, my mother tied their webbed legs together with yellow binder twine and we all joined in chanting:

  Christmas is coming,

  The geese are getting fat,

  Please put a penny

  In the old man’s hat.

  If you haven’t got a penny

  A halfpenny will do

  And if you haven’t got a halfpenny

  Then God bless you.

  When the last goose had had her legs tied, the sorting out of the feathers started. My mother had different boxes for different grades of feathers, and while we had been directed to the right box during plucking, there had been quite a few mix-ups which she now sorted out. Then the different boxes had to be carried to the attic at the top of the house and here they would stay until the filling for pillows, cushions or feather ticks was required.

  The next job was to transport the geese to the old stone house at the end of the garden, which was known as the turf-house, though I never remember it holding turf. That morning the ivy-covered house had been scrubbed out in preparation for its duty as a funeral parlour. Earlier that year it had been the goslings’ delivery chamber when they had chipped their way out of the big goose eggs into the light of day. Now we made our way there, each of us bearing a naked goose aloft, our way lighted by the combined power of the moon and my father’s storm lantern that he used for checking the cows in their stalls at night. When we arrived into the low house, the moonlight deserted us and the storm lantern sent scary shadows up and down the old stone walls. We handed them one by one to my mother and she hung them off the rafters, where they swung with outstretched wings and heads pointed downwards like fallen angels.

  Out in the goose-house the mother goose and the gander cuddled up close together. Their year’s work was done and the gander was looking forward to the spring.

  Getting the Holidays

  ALL THAT WEDNESDAY we waited for him to make the announcement, but as the shadows of the grey winter’s evening crept in and obliterated the long sooty cobwebs hanging from the rafters, our hearts sank sadly into our wet muddy boots and we became rows of grey lumps of misery slumped along the desks in front of the Master. He had it in his power to ignite us into airborne balloons of joy with a declaration of intent that we were to get the holidays on Friday. We knew that we just had to get them on Friday as Christmas was the following week and we never went to school on Christmas week. But until the official announcement was made there was a sense of uncertainty about the whole thing. The Master controlled everything in our school world and we thought that maybe if he so decided he could postpone Christmas. Our heads told us that he could not, but our hearts did not feel so sure. All we wanted for the floodgates of our expectations to be opened was to hear the magic words “Christmas holidays”. He was the angel who could declare unto us that Christmas was about to begin but for some reason best known to himself he remained silent while dozens of pleading eyes implored him to relent. That day he choose to keep the good news to himself.

  I watched him from the back seat of the draughty classroom. He stood on the high rostrum at the top left-hand corner of the square room from where he had a grandstand view of any dubious activities that might take place. His glasses, which normally resided on top of his iron-grey hair, were now perched on his long nose as he corrected our copy-books. They seemed to be bringing him little pleasure as occasionally he peered in disapproval at us out over the top of his glasses. He was strict but fair and usually we liked him well enough, but his silence now meant that he was not our favourite person. Suddenly he stepped down off the rostrum and walked along between the desks, rattling the change in his pocket. I was very impressed by the fact that he had enough money to make such a jingle and I sometimes tried to estimate how much money exactly he had in the pocket of his shiny brown pants. He was the only man in my everyday world who had soft white hands and polished shoes, and I wondered what it would be like to live in a world of polished shoes.

  As the Master turned his back to walk up the room I caught my sister Eileen’s eye across the desks. Normally we were good friends but today a cold war was being waged between us. The previous morning I had sneaked a new cardigan to school under my coat. It was a bright red and yellow Fair Isle and I loved it especially because it was my first new, shop-bought cardigan. Most of our clothes were home-made or hand-me-downs, so this bright cardigan with its soft feel was very special. It was for Sunday wear only but I wanted to show it off to my tormentor Maura; she was the only girl in the class who did not believe in Santa, which made her enemy number one in my world. I had boasted about it to her and she had challenged me to wear it to school or otherwise she would not believe that I actually had it. So after breakfast I had doubled back upstairs and put it on under my coat. In doing this I knew that I had broken one of my mother’s rules, but I felt it was worth it to see the look of surprise on Maura’s face. That evening my sister cornered me coming home from school.

  “Why did you wear your Sunday cardigan?” she asked.

  “No why,” I told her.

  “I know why,” she countered.

  “You don’t,” I told her.

  “Oh yes I do,” she asserted.

  “Why so?” I challenged.

  “You wanted to impress Butter-Belly Bill.”

  “I did not!” I screamed at her.

  “You did so,” she declared. “I saw him picking up your pencil off the ground when it rolled off the end of your desk.”

  “Shut up!” I shouted at her. “I don’t even like Billy Tobin and I think that you’re a horrible snot to call him that name just because he’s fat.” And I ran down the field ahead of her calling back over my shoulder: “Nellie, Nellie. Nellie with the Timber Belly!” That evened the score but we still were not “good friends”. Now, behind the Master’s back, I hung off the end of the desk and stuck my tongue out at her as far as was physically possible. In return she put her two thumbs into the corner of her mouth and extended it to the edges of her face and screwed up her eyes until they disappeared into two narrow slits.

  The Master did a fast turn on one heel, bringing a temporary cease-fire to our facial warfare. Then he walked over to the big old fireplace in the corner. The only thing our school fire heated was the chimney, but it coughed out smoke that covered the map on the wall overhead with black soot so that when we were being taught Irish geography, it was first necessary to give the Galtee Mountains a swipe of a feather duster to unveil their geographic dimensions. The Master peered up at the school clock and then he clapped his hands together and said in a loud voice: “Amach libh” (“Out you go”).

  This announcement stimulated a stampede for the door which resulted in a body jam in the porch where straining hands pulled assorted coats from the rusty hooks overhead. Then we tore out the door,
dragging coats and sacks on over our shoulders, and sloshed out through the sodden schoolyard, heads down, intent only on reaching the comfort of home to ease off damp boots and thaw out frozen toes in front of the fire. Due to the cold and to the disappointment of no holiday announcement, we were in no humour to prolong the journey.

  My father met us in the yard where he was bringing straw to the stables. “How are the scholars?” was his usual salute when he met us coming home from school and this evening, having viewed our faces, he also queried: “No news of the holidays?”

  “No,” was the dismal confirmation.

  “Maybe he’ll forget to give them to ye,” he grinned, rubbing salt into the wound.

  When we reached the kitchen my mother was far more comforting. “Tomorrow without a doubt,” she told us, “and the only reason that he did not tell ye today was because ye would not do another stroke of work for him once the excitement of the holidays hit ye.”

  What she said made sense and we all felt better. She had the happy knack of putting everything into perspective, and later that evening when I went out to collect the eggs, I crossed off another day on my series of strokes along the inside of the galvanised door of the hen-house. When the count-down to the Christmas holidays had begun I had got a soft white stone and marked out a series of lines to represent the remaining school days. Every evening it gave me intense pleasure to put a stroke through another day: a step nearer to freedom and to Christmas. Now there were only two strokes left. Tomorrow he would just have to tell us! That night we did our lessons grudgingly and complained that it was “not fair”, to which complaint my father had his constant answer that the sooner we learnt that life was not fair the better for ourselves. We were in no humour to listen to his philosophical observations and I wondered if he was like Maura and had never believed in Santy.

  The following evening, just before he clapped his hands for the final dismissal, the Master made the long-awaited announcement, which was received with hoots of delight.

  That Friday morning we went to school on winged feet. We were getting the holidays! The weather had changed overnight and our muddy gaps were now rock-solid frozen ridges interspersed with pools of black ice. Where the day before we had had to pick our steps to avoid being submerged in mud, now we were free to dance on top of it. The freedom matched our mood, and when we arrived into the hilly field behind the school, we crouched down on our heels and, wrapping our hands around our knees, we sped down the icy path that yesterday had been a mucky stream. One after the other we sped down the icy slope and with every skate the slope became more slippery.

  We arrived in school red-nosed and puffing, and though the Master tried to pretend that it was a normal school day, he gave up the struggle at lunchtime and studies gave way to riddles and stories. Then we started to tidy things away. All the copy-books had to be stored in the top of the high press where they would be safe from the rats who took over when we went home. They occupied the world under the floorboards and sometimes did not even wait for us to retreat before they made their appearance. We had to make everything secure against them as they would have a full uninterrupted two weeks in which to call the place their own. The boys went outside to tidy the turf in the shed behind the school and we brought down the cobwebs that were within reach; for the first time since the fire had been lit in the autumn we got to see a clean face on the entire map of Ireland. Maura and I worked together emptying the ink wells and our former struggle for one-upmanship was temporarily put on hold. As the Master locked up the big roll-books in the rostrum and hung the duster over the clean blackboard, we could hear the high and low infants in the room next door banging their small blackboards and ball-frames into their cófra (cupboard).

  The porch where we stored our coats and lunches had to be cleared out of left-overs that had accumulated since the summer holidays.

  “You didn’t leave your posh cardigan,” my sister whispered to me.

  “Shut up!” I shot back, but it was the last round in a dying battle.

  The old stone trough that held our lunches had a collection of green-lined milk bottles that had to be collected and distributed to reluctant owners. Nobody recognised their own bottle but everybody recognised their neighbour’s and in this way they were all disposed of eventually. We pulled on our coats with smiles on our faces. When the Master turned the big key in the old battered door, it had an air of finality about it. We were free! The school was locked and the blight of doing our lessons no longer hung over us. We breathed sighs of relief. We had the holidays now and were free to get ready for Christmas!

  The Christmas Chimney

  THE DAY WE SAW his camp by the bridge at the bottom of the hill, we knew that Black Ned had arrived to clean our chimney for Santa. Most travelling people moved around the countryside in groups or as part of one large family, but Ned was different. He was a silent loner who came and went quietly.

  He never initiated a conversation and barely replied to any questions that were put to him. Once when I asked if he was ever lonely, he looked at me in surprise and said: “No”, and then added, which was unusual for Ned, “I like being alone.”

  A travelling chimney sweep, well over six foot tall, he was almost as thin as one of his own chimney sticks. His clothes were black and greasy and fitted him so tightly that his arms and legs were like narrow branches attached to a tall, slim tree, and when I looked up at him from my nine-year-old height, I thought that Ned went up for ever.

  He had a piebald pony and a brightly painted cart under which he sheltered his grey canvas tent. Inside in it lay his long black chimney brushes, and his brown and white wire-haired terrier guarded its entrance with a sharp vicious bark and the hair standing up on the back of his neck. The pony and the terrier were almost the same colour, and while the terrier barked and growled, the pony kicked and would bite if you were foolish enough to come too close. Ned’s third travelling companion was a bantam cock which perched on top of the upheeled cart and crowed shrilly. They were a colourful collection and of them all Ned was the one who made the least noise. To me he was the black spirit of Christmas come to prepare the way for Santa, and I loved to watch him boil his black kettle over the fire outside his tent. He could catch rabbits and pheasants, so he dined well, and the people were generous to him because it was an accepted fact in the neighbourhood that Ned was a gentleman.

  On the day of his arrival the kitchen fire was quenched after the breakfast. It was strange to see that corner of the kitchen without the life of the fire. Then the whole recess was cleared of pots and pans. The crane that swivelled back and forth was now bare of its kettles and hangers and its iron leg was lifted out of its underground swivel; the whole clattering menagerie was taken out into the yard and the chimney recess was covered with old coarse bags. Old Minnie, our cat, was evicted from her warm corner under the hob and meowed in protest around the kitchen. It was the one day of the year when the heat of the kitchen fire was missing, and we all felt a little bit like Minnie, that we did not quite know where to put ourselves.

  He arrived with a clatter of chimney sticks and no talk and set immediately to work. Ours was a wide chimney and when you stood in under it and looked up you could see the sky, but the amount of sky on view depended on the prevailing soot conditions. To ascertain how things were up along, Ned stooped down to get in under the chimney breast and most of him disappeared up the chimney. He reappeared blacker than before and grunted in characteristically eloquent comment. Ned liked a real dirty chimney and the less of the sky he could see, the louder his grunt of appreciation.

  He untied his chimney sticks and, catching the one with the black tarry bristles on top, he pushed it up the chimney and then tied another on to the end of it with a black rag. And so gradually the bundle of sticks on the floor decreased in number and disappeared up the chimney. As the sticks dwindled the soot started to move. It rolled down in billowing clouds and Ned’s legs and that corner of the kitchen disappeared in a black fog. It wafte
d around the rest of the kitchen like black thistledown and slowly covered everything.

  It was my job then to run outside and watch for the brush to come out at the top. When its black sooty head emerged triumphant, I shouted in delight and ran to tell Ned’s long thin legs that it was after making it to the top. He grunted in satisfaction.

  Up and down the chimney, backwards and forwards, he pushed the brushes, adding and subtracting lengths as the necessity arose. All the time the soot cascaded down in showers. Gradually the showers eased off, then changed to soot flakes and finally dried up completely. Next he got a hoe and scraped down the hidden ledges.

  Then I joined Ned to judge the state of the chimney. It was as clean as a whistle and a big patch of blue sky was visible, and so it was ready for Santa. Up along we could even see the iron brads that he could use as footholds on his way down.

  When Ned had gone the big return began, but first my sisters took advantage of the opportunity to give that corner of the kitchen a big overhaul. Behind the iron bellows was always a dumping corner for homeless odds and ends, but these were now evicted. Long lost odd stockings saw the light of day for the first time in months, but it was obvious that moths and mice had been on friendly terms with them in the meantime. When the area behind the bellows had become litter-free, my sister Frances produced the big white goose-wing and whipped out any remaining scraps; dry, grey dust drifted up the chimney. Then the white goose-wing did the rounds of the whole corner, but was no longer so white when it had finished. After that my father decided to oil the bellows, which was a lengthy task because parts of it had to be dismantled, and while this went on we all shivered around the kitchen. Finally it was back in place. The crane was brought in and part of its leg disappeared underground and it swung into position. Then the fire was lit and the pots and kettles returned and we were back in action, but it took the kitchen a good few hours to recover from the freezing it had got.