Great Meadow by Dirk Bogarde

it was a jolly cold and fiddly job, I can tell you), I said, very politely, ‘Where is the tree, Papa?’
    He straightened up and put his hands to his mouth and said, ‘Oh! My god!’, which was pretty awful, but he looked so worried that I pretended I hadn’t heard what he said and just went on talking and screwing the things that held the windows down.
    â€˜I know the goose is there – Lally said it was a “giant of a bird” – and there was the box of crackers, because I saw the name in wriggly writing, but there isn’t a tree.’
    And there wasn’t, and our mother was quite amused when we told her and said it really didn’t matter, we’d do without a tree this year because there had been so many problems for our father to worry about. He just forgot it, and it wouldn’t have fitted into the car anyway. We had Minnehaha, crackers, the goose, even the pudding from October, and we had
them
, safe and sound. So that seemed reasonable, and Lally brought in the tea and a big dish of buttery crumpets with a lid on, and so I just forgot the tree. Well, sort of.
    Minnehaha had almost settled down by this time, of course. He was pretty old, and he knew the cottage, and so he just went poking about here and there, sniffing, and in the end he jumped up on my father’s lap and sat looking about him, his ears rather flat to his head. Flora said, ‘I think he’s scenting your wee mice in the cage. Cats have a wonderful sense of smell, that’s how they find their prey.’
    I really did want to give her a bonk on the nose, but Lally gave me one of her looks, and I just shrugged, and Lally said the mice were miles away in the lean-to, on a high shelf, and that Minnehaha was too old to ‘caper about mousing’. It was kind of her, but I wasn’t altogether certain. I didn’t like the flat ears bit. But, of course, he
could
just have been listening for strange sounds after our house in Hampstead. His tail was twitching slowly, and I felt a bit worried. But I
did
want to bonk Flora for putting the idea into his head.
    The lean-to was a bit cold. It had a tin roof and wooden walls, and no curtains or anything at the windows to keep out the draughts. But the Weekend seemed all right up on its shelf, and I’d given them a good chunk of fresh apple,some corn and a big fistful of hay for their bedding. There was a good smell everywhere of not only onions and paraffin, but creosote and turpentine. There were sacks of potatoes, a big row of marrows, jars of gooseberries and greengages, rows of our father’s painting things and canvases stacked in a corner, and a line of stone jars full of ginger beer and parsnip wine which our mother ‘put up’ at the end of every summer. I liked the lean-to very much. It was sort of outside the house but inside the house at the same time, because if you opened one door you were in the garden, and the other one opened right into the kitchen with the glowing range and the copper and all the dishes and pots and pans. It was really very decent.
    We didn’t have Christmas stockings now that we were more grown up. So even though I woke up early, even before Lally, because you could see there was no light round her door, there wasn’t much point in being awake because of no Christmas stocking, which was a bit sad. I remembered feeling it in the dark, the nuts in the toe, the tangerine a bit squashy if you weren’t careful, the interesting rustling of paper and the liquorice-strap (that was easy to tell by being flat
and
round), and the cracker wagging about at the top. It was pretty exciting, but now there was no stocking and no tree. I just hoped there were presents of some sort. I had asked for a theatre from Mr Pollock’s shop in Hoxton, but I didn’t suppose our father had had the time to go there, not if he forgot the tree.
    So I went to sleep again, and only woke up when Lally gave me a push