Happy Christmas all! Hope everyone had a great festive season. Not that it's over, but time for me at least to try to get back into doing some writing in my journals. And what better place to start than with
You don't want to know, and I don't want to tell you, what a scumbag my father is, but I can't really relate this story without referring to him, as he pretty much drives it. When I was young --- I'm talking maybe seven, eight years old --- we would always know that Christmas was on the way because we would be told to write our letters to Santa and they would, quite literally, be sent up the chimney to disappear in a puff of smoke, we always somehow rationalising that this was a passage to the North Pole and that the Big Guy would by some magical means be able to receive our letters, the Christmas decorations, including the big old servicable tree that had stood in the living room for what seemed like a decade or more, would make their annual appearance but more importantly and more remembered, the other mysterious pilgrimage from the attic would begin.
Like most, if not all households, we used our attic to store things that were only required every so often, as well as things that were probably never to be seen again --- dolls my elder sister had grown out of, tricycles we were too big to ride, old toys --- and this of course included Christmas decorations but more importantly to this story, the owl fella's collection of records. We had an ancient radiogram in the sitting room. You probably don't know what that is, unless you're old as me (and even then you may not) but basically it was a huge, squat monster than looked kind of like a large fruit machine or one of those old vending machines that used to dispense cigarettes in hotel lobbies and the like. It was bloody massive, and heavy, made of probably oak but certainly some heavy wood, with varnished knobs for turning the sound up and down (no bass or treble in those days) and a tuning knob for the radio.
My mother (God rest her soul) would always try to make things as pleasant for us as possible, and we would all get lost in the busy Christmas atmosphere as streamers (paper ribbons) would be carefully and meticulously stretched from one corner of the ceiling, to terminate by the lightbulb, another at right angles to that from the opposite side and then two more, so that we would, at the end, if done correctly, have an “X” of coloured paper with the light as its central point. Other decorations would be hung, from the ceiling and pinned to the walls, and although in latter years I've come to appreciate the logic behind the maxim “less is more”, back then we had every type of decoration imaginable, from happy Christmas Carollers in a Victorian setting on the wall to Santa himself smiling from the door. Real holly would be hung over the fireplace (eliciting some very annoyed gasps as the thorns invariably stuck into our flesh as we tried to arrange the damn thing properly, only to have it fall down again as we stood back to admire our work, and took the name of he for whom the season is named rather in vain!) and candles would be put out.
The traditional unravelling of the Christmas tree lights would begin, and go on, many not working but you could get it to obey you if you twisted each of the tiny bulbs until you discovered which one was faulty, and reindeer and snowmen and little parcels and sticks and angels all eventually depended from the branches of the old, worn-out tree, which looked, when fully dressed, as if it might topple over in despair, just give up the ghost. But it never did. The floor would become sticky with little pine needles, and the paper angel on top of the tree would glare down at us from her high perch as if to say
Are you sure this is safe? I often think now that we put up so much decorations as a sort of defence against our real, true, non-Christmas lives, though I at the time was too young to realise what was going on when I went to bed. I think my ma made sure that we were almost overburdened with Christmas, as if she could block out the fear and the tension that permeated every other day of the year, as if somehow the magic of Christmastime would dispel the darkness we lived under, blow the black cloud away and usher in a time of forbearance and peace. When she hung our Christmas sacks up (we didn't use stockings in Ireland, or at least in my house anyway) I often think sadly and angrily now that the only thing that she had on her own Christmas list was a peaceful and safe time for us all. We eventually got that, but it would only come about by the removal of the architect of our fear and oppression, whereupon we would all begin bright new lives. That was, however, a long time away yet.
Radiograms were what the name suggested: a combination of a radio (probably only Long Wave and Medium Wave, no FM in those days either) and a record-player (gramaphone), with its speakers built into the imposing surround of the thing, never seen, an integral part of the beast. There was of course no CD player, such things having yet to be invented, and no tape deck. The only USB we knew at that time stood for “Up Stairs to Bed”, so no, it didn't hook to any computer. Even those were in short supply in the early seventies. The radiogram used a curious arrangement for its records which was carried on in early record players, whereby you could “stack” two or three albums (or singles) above the turntable while another was playing, and when that one ended the mechanism would automatically drop the next one down, whereupon hitting the platter it would begin to play.
Now of course this was a very bad idea: a record slapping down onto another record was liable to scratch not only itself but the one now beneath it (and again, as the third one plopped down), and of course as the amount of records built up the stylus of the needle would have more trouble making an impression, leading to the higher likelihood of scratches developing. The only real plus side was that you could load up, I think about four records maybe, and then sit down and listen to them without having to get back up. Yes, again, remote controls were a long way off. Naturally, you could only listen to side one of each album, but then you could always turn them all over, stack 'em up and go again for the second side.
The point about all this is that, every Christmas, at least when I was young, the father would bring a chair up to the landing and prise open the attic doorway, then we would be sent up to the dark, forbidding, dusty and frankly scary space to locate and haul out his private stash of LPs. These were all 78s (which meant they ran at 78 RPM, or revolutions per minute, a standard soon dropped as the more popular 33 RPM for albums and 45 RPM for singles became the accepted benchmark) and were very old. I would say they were pressed maybe in the forties. The covers were all, naturally, quite dusty, despite having been kept in boxes all year, and they had an unmistakable aroma about them, a smell of wax and plastic I always came to associate with the festive period.
From January to mid-December these albums may as well not have existed. My father was not one to play music; perhaps the radio, but even with such a relatively reasonable collection of records he did not play them at all. It was only when Christmas arrived that we would see these almost legendary discs, and marvel at the colourful covers on each, and the odd names ---- Como, Sinatra, Williams, Crosby. These were, I believe, the first ever records of any sort I saw with my own eyes and held with my own hands, and of course as the only entertainment available I listened to them avidly as they spun around on the ancient turntable with many a squeak and crackle, a pop and a hiss as the abused needle laboured across scratches and indentations made years before. The sleeves were stiff and did not bend (nor did the records themselves, as I found to my cost one year when one snapped in half!) and were very colourful. Patriarchs of family value Christmas smiled out of them at me; Perry Como with a pipe in his mouth and a scarf wrapped around his neck, Nat “King” Cole relaxing in a rocking chair with a trumpet by his side, Connie Francis smiling winsomely beside a large Christmas tree. But though these images have faded into my already-failing memory over time, one sleeve always remains there, etched in my mind almost from the pure difference of it as from anything else.
I could not tell you what the record was called, though I believe it had something to do with nursery rhymes for children, and depicted, on a blue and white sleeve, a young child (I could not say then even if it was meant to be a boy or a girl, and perhaps that was left deliberately ambiguous by the artist) running up a flight of stairs, their shadow thrown in large, grotesque relief on the wall before them, in a nightshirt and cap, with a candle in hand. I always remember being vaguely afraid of this picture, I don't know why. Perhaps it was the pure terror of going up the stairs alone in the dark, which was not something at the tender age of seven I relished --- we all know the monsters that wait at the top of the stairs to grab the boy or girl who is not quick enough to turn on the light in time, and also that humming or talking to yourself keeps them at bay until you can reach that switch.
I got to know the records also by the labels. There was Decca, blue I believe with silver writing. Another was black with silver and then there was HMV, which at the time was called by its full name, His Master's Voice, a dark red label with that famous dog listening to the old gramaphone. That one always stood out to me. I also used to look at the back of the album sleeves, and inside too, where you would find advertisements for such giants as Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis, though I of course at the time had no idea who they were, nor Pete Seeger. But there was something otherworldly about them, almost alien in that they could be anyone, from anywhere, and with their wise faces --- usually, but not always smiling: Davis looked very grumpy --- they seemed like teachers awaiting the chance to impart important and perhaps forbidden knowledge to me. Their silent entreaties, however, fell on deaf ears.
I think, when I do think about it now, that the reason I never got into any of these artistes --- unlike some of you, who were drawn to their parents' music --- is that he never encouraged me, or any of us, to explore the music. He never spoke about it. In fact, when he put the records on it was in silence, almost reverential but also a sullen silence, as if he were grudgingly allowing us to share in something he considered his.
You can listen to these but they're mine. Possibly why he only played them at Christmas. As a result, I grew up scornful of these artistes and wove my own musical path of preference as I grew older, a path which diverged sharply from the music my father played, but never really seemed to love or even like. It was almost a ritual, a robot placing platters on a disc thanks to some long-forgotten program that was still running, unattended and unremarked upon, its original purpose long forgotten and no longer cared about. Also, we did not have a choice: we could not leave the room; once the records were on the turntable we were
required to listen, whether we liked it or not. I associated these men and women with that world and resolved to have nothing to do with it.
My father had no idea how to treat records either. Even at this early age I seemed to realise that handling the vinyl as he did --- picking it up by the corner and pulling it out of the sleeve --- was wrong, but what did I know? He would often put the records back in their stiff sleeves without bothering to also use the inner sleeve, which was there to protect the record from the harsher, sharper edges on the outer sleeve. The needle on the radiogram too, would only get the most cursory breath over it to dislodge any heavy dust and he never dusted the records themselves, leading to more scratches each year and the albums becoming less listenable every subsequent Christmas, and I doubt he ever changed the stylus, but it served us well.
All this side, there was a definite magical air that settled over the house as Bing Crosby would begin singing about “White Christmas” or Cole would intone the first lines of “The Christmas Song”, and for a while peace would reign in the world, and it really did feel like Christmas. Once the season had passed though, the radiogram would be shut down and unplugged, and we would have to wait another eleven-and-a-half months until the ghosts from Christmas Past would again rise from the attic and regale us with songs we had heard, many times before, but never got tired of listening to, clustered around the squat musical monster as we shut out the real world for a week or so and tried, for that period, to be a normal family.
Sometimes it even worked...