I listened to your story of Stephanie’s trip to London yesterday on The Vinyl Cafe. I too was brought up in London after the war, and Dorothy’s description of the Christmas parcel from Canada reduced me to tears.
You see, we also got Christmas parcels from a cousin in Canada. Forever known as “René’s parcels,” they arrived for four straight years in the middle of November. I remember the day the first one came in the mail. We’d been out for a walk, Mum and I.
That’s what you did during the war: walked around all the shops to see if they had anything—food or fuel—to buy. When we got home, tired and cold, my grandmother said a parcel had come for us, from René.
The package was in the front room. Coal was rationed at the time, so we used to heat only one room. I remember opening the door of the front room and being enveloped in a rush of cold and a wonderful smell. When I asked Mum what the smell was she said it was from all the pine trees in Canada. For years, that’s how I thought of Canada—cold and pine trees.
The parcel was carefully sewn into a flour sack, which Mum painstakingly unpicked stitch by stitch while I danced with impatience.
I was about four at the time and had only heard about the wonderful Christmas presents wrapped in colourful paper that would come my way when the war was over. To me the parcel contained all the riches of Araby wrapped up in a flour sack.
Eventually Mum got the sack, covered in colourful stamps, unpicked. She set it carefully aside. She later made the sacks into tea towels, aprons, and pillowcases. But now she began to carefully open the cardboard box inside.
And instead of the riches of Araby wrapped in coloured paper there was—food! I was a bit disappointed at first. Until Mum began removing the contents. She and my grandmother exclaimed over every item. There was a Christmas cake laden with dried fruit, and a one-pound bag of sugar—more sugar than we’d had at one time since rationing started. The parcel always contained things that were rationed, in short supply, or just unobtainable—all things I’d never seen. And there was always one small present for me—a comic book, a leather bag, a pair of fancy hair barrettes that were so unusual people would stop Mum in the street to ask where she’d got them.
One year there was a chicken in a glass jar—a wonder indeed. As Mum took it out of the box she said, “Here’s our Christmas dinner,” and it was. Together with the Christmas pudding it made a festive meal.
Then there was the year Customs opened the box, the first and only time it happened. They included a note telling us they’d searched the parcel, but in the search they cut open the paper bag of sugar. They put it in another bag and put it back of course, but it had spilled all over the box and its contents. Mum spread a cloth on the table and wiped the sugar off each item. Then she carefully flattened the box and shook each grain of sugar into a bowl, going over each seam and fold again and again to make sure no grains were missed—all the while tears pouring down her face at the unfairness of it all.
Mum cried again at the end of the war when René wrote to say she’d heard that things were back to normal in the U.K. now that the war was over and she didn’t think we needed any more parcels. I wanted Mum to write and tell René that conditions were still dreadful. Mum explained that the cost of the food and the postage were probably too expensive for René, so we wrote and thanked her for her help instead.
Eventually I visited René and her family. Later, I moved to Canada and met my husband. I’ve been here ever since.
When René passed away a few years ago, instead of placing flowers on her grave, I placed a small box wrapped in Christmas paper.
I got a few odd looks, but René, my mum, and I knew what it meant … and that’s all that mattered to me.
Winnipeg, Manitoba