57
Brightly Shone The Rain That Night

Boxing Noon, and Hampstead Heath resembles nothing so much as the gale-scattered covers of all those comic annuals ripped yestermorn from their urgent stockings. So many bright new Mickey Mouse gloves! So many bright new Rupert Bear scarves! So many bright new Garfield earmuffs and Kermit boots and Peanuts pullovers! The world, new-laminated, is crying ‘Hallo, Chums!’ Cavorting gaily in the drizzled gloom, all this iridescent giftery – on adult and child alike – seems to bespeak not so much Christmas as some medieval Haberdasherie Fayre upon which the city’s cordwainers and hosiers and mercers and drapers and hatters have descended to propitiate their diverse tutelary gods and flog their latest lines.

It is all so cartoon-jolly that I do not immediately notice that something is missing. What makes me finally notice it is the singularly poignant sight of a small boy sledding down the sodden East Heath slope, towards the Vale of Health. He has new yellow moonboots on, and a new Snoopy flying helmet. He has a new sled. He could be on the cover of the Beano Annual, were it not for the one thing he does not have. He does not have snow.

Poor little begger. He is making a valiant fist of it, shoving himself off from just beneath me, lurching down the wet grass, slaloming the bushes with expert toe and mitten, bumping to a halt after a dozen yards, then struggling up again, his mudcaked sled trailing erratically behind him on its sodden string. Had he snow, he would not stop at all, he would hurtle on, shrieking joyously, scattering the pirouetting skaters on Hampstead Pond and finally fetch up, breathless, in Gospel Oak. Because, if he had snow, there would be skaters on Hampstead Pond today, rather than the goose-bumped madmen flaunting their traditional braggadocio in the unfrozen ooze.

Maybe, in his head, he has it. The imagination, at seven, is rich. Maybe he goes down the hill with six huskies in front and a pack of wolves behind. Maybe the unflagging effort is all about getting to Gospel Oak before Amundsen. My point (I have just decided) is that he shouldn’t have to. He is forced to imagine only because he is forced to compensate for unnecessary disappointment. He should not have been led to expect snow. He should not have torn open his bedroom curtains, immediately after tearing open his sled-wrappings, to have his heart sunk by only drizzle specking the panes.

For two months now, cotton-wool has been his promissory note. He has stared through it at frosted toys, while Muzak jingled sleigh-bells at him. Tempted inside, he has sat on Santa’s snow-booted knee, and heard how reindeer struggle through blizzards on behalf of good little boys. All his weekly reading has featured snow-capped mastheads, all the stuff within has occupied itself with snowball fights, thin ice, risible snowmen, and mad dogs happily frozen suddenly solid in the act of going for a newsboy’s shin. Everything he has watched on television has ostensibly taken place in arctic conditions, and all anyone has talked about has been the prospect of the white Christmas of which he has been encouraged to dream.

No chance. We have not had a white yule in 20 years, and the odds on our warming globe ever offering one must be incalculably long. This isn’t Lapland. Christmas snow is but one more EC standard to which we have let ourselves be hijacked. Is it not time to chuck this damaging delusion in?

What it does here at Christmas is rain. We should make this a meteorological virtue. Let us have a British Santa in cheery yellow oilskins and sou’wester, ho-ho-ho-ing through the drizzle in a dory tugged by six big cod. Let fake raindrops twinkle down our shop windows from autumn on, let our cards show robins on floating logs and coaches in flying spray, and each display, advertisement and grotto anticipate the joys of snug dry firesides bonding happily families together against the cats and dogs beyond.

Sing I’m Dreaming of a Wet Christmas, Cliff, and let’s be done with it.