Christmas

At the end of a quiet street, at the edge of a large town, stood a beautiful old house. On either side in flat silent gardens the houses sat cold and weary. There was heat inside them made by white boxes on kitchen walls that clicked and moaned through the winter nights, but outside the houses looked dull and lifeless. Their chimneys stood damp and empty above closed up fireplaces.

Only at the house called fourteen was it any different. The garden was like a sleeping jungle. It was the middle of winter. The leaves had fallen and the trees stood dark and quiet but still the garden was full of life. Birds cluttered up the branches and small secret creatures tunnelled through the thick piles of leaves hunting for food. The house itself looked warm and comfortable like a big armchair. There was no white box on its kitchen wall and in its fireplaces real fires danced and crackled. Every single brick was warm and cosy. The whole house seemed to glow in the November darkness.

The days of winter moved slowly on and it started to get very cold. The sun kept low all day. Its light was weak and tired and gave out so little heat that the heavy frost lay undisturbed from dawn to dusk. Every twig, every blade of grass, was covered in crystals of ice that sparkled like a million tiny diamonds as the thin sun danced through them. A deep cold crept into every corner. In the deserted factories across the canal, ferns of ice crystals covered the windows and from the pale roofs icicles hung down towards the freezing ground. The canal itself froze over, dark dull grey at first then white as frost covered the surface. Ducks flew in sprawling and sliding across the ice, trailing wild skid marks and frantic footprints as they tried to slow down. As the swans came down they crashed into each other and sent the ducks scattering in all directions. For weeks the canal was covered with irritable clumsy birds falling down at every step yet too confused to fly away to warmer waters.

As the winter sank deeper and deeper into the earth so the worms and moles dug down below it. Sensible animals had flown away to warmer lands while those that were left did the best they could to survive. Some crept into their beds and hibernated. Others fluffed themselves up and waited for spring. People, unable to adapt like most animals, hid in thick clothes and blew clouds of steam into the air.

In December even the clouds grew cold and slipped quietly away. For two weeks the sky was pale blue from side to side. It was a thin wintery sky that seemed much less part of the world than the bright skies of summer. Far above, in its highest reaches, the smoke lines of aeroplanes crossed from one horizon to another covering the world in white cobwebs.

Dennis the owl sat in his big oak tree and shivered.

‘I wish I could hibernate,’ he said.

‘Well, why don’t you?’ said a robin, sitting on a branch above him.

‘I’ve tried,’ said Dennis, ‘but I keep falling asleep.’

‘Yes, but...’ the robin started to explain but Dennis wasn’t listening. He was looking up at the sky. The sun had given up and gone off to Australia and thick black clouds were rolling across the town. It was as if someone was wrapping the world up in a heavy eiderdown. It was only midday but it had grown so dark that it felt like evening.

‘Oh well,’ said Dennis, ‘time for bed.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said the robin. ‘It’s only midday.’

‘But it’s dark,’ said Dennis. ‘It must be bedtime.’

‘It isn’t always bedtime just because it’s dark,’ said the robin.

‘Of course it is,’ said Dennis.

‘What about thunderstorms?’ said the robin. ‘The sky gets really dark when there’s a thunderstorm. What do you do then?’

‘Go to bed,’ said Dennis and then he added, ‘What do you do?’

‘Hide under a branch until it’s finished,’ said the robin. ‘And get wet.’

‘That’s clever,’ said Dennis and went to bed.

Two days before Christmas it snowed. The wind stopped blowing, the bitter cold air seemed to grow warmer and at midnight the snow began to fall. The big white flakes floated down from the clouds in total silence. Other sounds grew fainter too. As the snow settled on the roads, the noise of the traffic grew softer. The whole city faded to a quiet murmur, quieter than the countryside. And beyond the city the countryside itself was as silent as an empty dream.

In the garden the animals that lived by night awoke to find their homes buried. The rabbits and the mice made new tunnels through the snow. Even though it was the first snow that many of them had seen, they knew by instinct what to do. Only Dennis the owl was confused. He hopped out of his hole in the oak tree and stood on the branch.

‘Where’s all the colour gone?’ he said. ‘It’s washed away.’

Apart from the yellow squares of light from the windows across the lawn everything was white. Dennis walked along where he thought the branch should be and fell off. He floundered around on the ground kicking and flapping great clouds of snow into the air until he finally shook himself free and fluttered up to the tree.

‘Help, I’m on fire,’ he shouted. ‘There’s smoke everywhere.’ But it was just the snow.

As daylight appeared the wind began to grow. The snow that had fallen as softly as feathers now began to dance in frantic circles. It grew until it was a blizzard running round and round the houses in a silent frenzy. It clung to walls and windows and piled itself up in great drifts against doors. Every animal fluffed itself up against the cold and waited. Birds sat huddled under branches while rabbits and mice peered out from their tunnels and watched nature’s fury. It raged for hours until the whole world was painted white.

Inside the houses people slept. The snow on the windows blocked out the daylight so that all morning it was as dark as early dawn. Those who did wake up at the right time found it impossible to tell what time of day it was and others, waking late, looked at their watches in disbelief. Most of them, finding they were late for work, took the day off and went back to bed. The people who did try and travel found they couldn’t get anywhere. The trains were frozen to the tracks, the buses locked up and cold and their cars wouldn’t start. Nature gave the world a day off and as it was nearly Christmas no one really minded.

At the house called fourteen, the two children who lived there went out into the back garden and built a snowman. From inside his tree Dennis the owl watched wide-eyed as it grew taller and taller on the lawn.

‘It’ll end in tears,’ he said, ‘and they’ll probably be mine.’

‘For goodness sake, Dennis, stop twittering and go to sleep,’ said Audrey the owl.

‘But there’s a huge giant on the lawn,’ said Dennis.

Ethel the chicken stood in the doorway of the hen hut and looked out at the garden. She fluffed out her feathers and settled down in the straw. Sparrows were fluttering from branch to branch sending little gusts of snow tumbling down. The children had cleared the bird table and it seemed as if every bird for miles around was feeding there. The bluetits were fighting around the wire cages of peanuts and in the trampled snow below them clumsy pigeons were pecking up their crumbs.

At lunchtime the man came out and hung a long line of bright coloured lights across the bushes along the back of the house. Red, blue, green and yellow, at night they glowed in the darkness like big gentle eyes. Dennis thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

‘It looks like heaven has come down into the garden,’ he said.

That night it snowed again, not great wild storms but just enough to fill in the footprints and smooth over the edges so that when everyone woke up on Christmas morning the world was new again. The snowman looked as if he had been wrapped up in a big flowing blanket. The roads that had become grey with traffic were clean and white again. The trees that had shrugged off their coats were covered once more and even the wires between the coloured lights had narrow snowdrifts balanced on them. It had frozen hard through the night and the pools of water where the sun had melted the snow the day before were now frozen through.

It was the first time in sixteen years that there had been snow on Christmas day. Of all the animals in the garden only Ethel was old enough to remember the last time. The two children hadn’t even been born then and would probably have children of their own by the time it happened again. And even though the snow began to melt that afternoon, for the family at the house called fourteen it was the best Christmas they had ever known.