Crime is hereditary, you
know. It propagates itself down through the generations and, before you know it,
you're tangled in its creeping tendrils up to your ears. So, look before you
leap and beware what you start. Spare a thought for your descendants when you
stray from the straight and narrow. 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first
we practise to deceive' my mother used to say. How right she was!
She was a country girl, my
mum: born and bred in a Somerset village and daughter of the village grocer. I
have photos of her as a young girl, on horseback, riding jauntily through the
heather with her sisters, high up in the Quantock Hills. It was a far cry from
the London suburbs where my sister and I spent our childhood days. We were city
dwellers and we never saw the country girl hidden deep in her heart until much
later. In our teenage years we moved, with our parents, to a nicer part of
London, close to the edge of the urban sprawl. We would make forays into the
countryside at weekends and, there in the Kent countryside, it seemed, a part
of Mum's old self was reborn. They would stop the car in a quaint Kentish
village, full of tile-hung cottages and gardens full of old-fashioned flowers,
and Mum would be off, strolling nonchalantly down muddy footpaths, bag in hand
and a pair of secateurs hidden in her pocket, happy as a sandboy.
Secateurs? You should have
seen her at Christmas! Dressed in 'slacks' and a moth-eaten old sheepskin
jacket, with a headscarf knotted under her chin, she would drag our reluctant
father down country lanes, armed with a walking stick and a pair of secateurs.
Dad would be cajoled into doing battle with prickly holly bushes, yanking down
tough branches with the walking stick whilst she snipped them off for her
flower arrangements. No Christmas was complete in our house without jugs full
of greenery and, behind the pictures, a sprinkling of holly and ivy that
gradually shed leaves and berries all through the holiday. Country habits die
hard.
Moving back to the country
myself, after many years in the city, I am aware that aspects of my past are
coming back to haunt me. Having spent summer and autumn days exploring river
banks and country lanes in my new rural home, admiring the countless varieties
of wild flowers in the hedgerows (and not
picking them!) and helping myself to nature's handouts in the form of sweet,
juicy blackberries and windfallen apples to fill the freezer, I am ready to
enjoy nature's bounty at Christmastime too. All of a sudden, I am finding
myself whistling merrily '..the holly and the ivy, when they are both full
grown, of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown...' and
a little urge comes upon me to supplement tree and tinsel, angels and baubles,
with a little rustic charm of a traditional nature. Out come the secateurs, the
bag, the jacket - no, not the
headscarf! - and I am off down the country lanes to seek out Christmas past and
follow in my family's footsteps.
It is a different kind of
Christmas, rooted in the soil, in the country traditions, in folk carols and
wassailing, figgy pudding and mulled mead and I am loving it! A Merry Christmas
one and all!