Memories of a country Christmas

Lurching sharp right with its wobbling cargo of red and green, the machine recedes down a darkening School Street leaving a cloud of blue diesel smoke.

On the eaves along the farmhouse, pheasants swing from their gibbet in the crisp air, wrinkled eyelids tight-shut for their endless sleep.

They will not be disturbed from their slumbers, even if the robins are incessantly click-clicking in the hazel coppice by the barn.

The pheasants met their deaths two weeks ago, shot down in mid-flight, corn-bloated hulks that could hardly get airborne, easy targets for massed guns.

Now they dangle like 18th Century highwaymen suspended from the Tyburn Tree.

Down the road from the farm, village children full of jellies and cakes run laughing home. Some of those rosy, frost-kissed faces will, by bedtime, be green rather than red. You can count on it.

That all-too-brief visit by the late December sun, so mean with its gifts of warmth at this time of year, will soon be over. The parliaments of rooks spiralling above the paddock know this, and presently they will turn and wheel as one, bound for their stick-houses high in the spinney's ash tops.

Already, the temperature is falling. The holes in the pond's ice made by small boys with stones hours previously are sealing over, once more locking in their mud sarcophagus countless hibernating frogs and newts.

And all the while, the crimson, burning orb of a sun is melting into the westerly horizon, a red-hot coal sucked down into another night.

Holly berries, fat pheasants, laughing children, cawing rooks - and, quite possibly, there's a partridge in a pear tree somewhere. For Yuletide, the happy time that comes but once a year, is here at last...

It is the day before Christmas Eve, the final hours before reality is suspended for the duration.

Soon it will be December 24, and the final preparations for the Great Day will reach fever pitch, all hustle, bustle... wood to chop, endless puddings to make, birds to be plucked as they dangle by pinioned feet held to the hovel door with baling twine...

Each hand motion, every downward, skilled stroke slowly denudes poor Biddy. It is a gradual striptease that will ultimately leave her naked and pimpled in the cold.

Biddy has, until this morning, lived in her whitewashed wooden box in the kitchen. Bullied by the other Leghorns who pecked her rear to the texture of an over-ripe strawberry, her convalescence underneath the sink progressed well.

The feathers eventually returned, comb once more gorged with iron-rich blood, thanks to a diet of kitchen scraps, and her plumes became luxurious snowdrifts of well-being. However, as it is Christmas, a higher duty lies ahead for Biddy.

For she must die this day. And we will weep buckets right up to the time when she too, hangs suspended from that awful hovel door, her spectacular white tutu lying in a heap on the path.

But Biddy's resurrection will be on Christmas Day, when her once pink skin will have been tanned a deep brown, bared breast puffed out with rosemary, sage and thyme.

Soon it will be time for the Last Supper and all thoughts of Biddy in life will have been swept aside by a tidal wave of titillated tastebuds.

This being 1958, Christmas Day will start at 3am. That will be the hour when my eager feet first come into contact with the bulging pillow case at the foot of the bed, toes probing and feeling those mysterious objects Father Christmas has just deposited.

No doubt Donner and Blitzen have eaten the raw carrots and the Great Man will have devoured the mince pies and drunk the glass of whisky. Perhaps the snow dragged in by those long-suffering beasts will still be on the mat, melting before our eyes, while the toys-laden sleigh vanishes over the treetops.

But what lies hidden in that pillow case? A history book hopefully, a plastic howitzer that fires wooden shells, two field guns that shoot small metal projectiles, an assortment of comic annuals, bars of chocolate and plastic soldiers.

On Christmas night, Dad and I will line up the new recruits at the bottom of a cleared dining table, where they will be obliged to accept our shot. Dad's pipe always provides the special effects as he synchronises fire with a puff of blue smoke and a loud "pukkkooo-oo" noise while the poor bloody infantry take it three feet away.

And after the carnage will come the victory celebrations. Not only will we be allowed to stay up late, but there will also be a tumbler of beer on offer, too. Much of the magic of Christmas is that usual rules don't apply.

Christmas Day slips by all too quickly, but Boxing Day is a drawn-out affair that appears to go on forever. Lunch will consist of leftovers from the day before - and then, around mid-afternoon, those mysterious relatives from Leicester will arrive en masse.

There will be Uncle Ben, Auntie Vi, grandma and granddad and assorted other grown-ups. That night, as the air in the lounge grows thick with pipe, cigar and cigarette smoke, games are to be played, the contests only being interrupted by the trolley being wheeled in, its casters squeaking in protest at the weight of endless sardines on toast, pickled onions, bread and cheese.

Uncle George from across the road has joined us by now, probably lured by the prospect of a few glasses of home-made wine. After a while, he too might select a cannon and take his turn firing into the remaining ranks of soldiers that still march in perfect drill order across a battlefield of utility furniture timber.

Before long, corpses litter the woodwork, rigid in their plastic rigor mortis.

Sadly, our 1950s Christmas must come to an end. A house that was briefly so full of life and merriment quite suddenly returns to everyday normality.

And at Cook's farm, the tractor that so recently transported the symbols of the season now awaits other tasks that will be its lot in the coming New Year.