Nine Shopping Days till Christmas

Not quite December but already Christmas lights twinkle along Princes Street and the festive tree on the Mound is being buffeted by teasing zephyrs. The Big Wheel spins…

My mother liked writing poetry. This strand travelled down her mother’s side of the family. Frisking family papers as one sometimes does while looking for such essential documents as birth and death certificates (of ancestors) I came across a set of poems by one of Mother’s great-uncles: Truth’s Victory (over ‘slavish superstition’s chain’), Morning Song (where ‘Mankind will reach the loftiest height, victorious o’er these realms of night’), and A Reverie which looks forward to the ‘Spirit world of glad reunion’. Mother’s mother tended to faery.

My mother enjoyed playing with words.

What has all this to do with Christmas? Among her typescripts is a poem written some thirty or more years ago on the more enjoyable side of Christmas shopping. She is travelling back from Glasgow to Troon at the end of the day.

Nine Shopping Days till Christmas
Dusky train sways
Glinting rails
Flashing lights
As landscape fails.
Evening papers
Opened wide
Hide each
A city gent
Inside,
Or,
Folded small
On rocking knees
The more alert
With
Cross-words tease.
Shoppers
In their parcels
Peep.
Another head
Jerks into sleep

Oh blissful hour
Caught out of life,
No longer
Shopper
Mother
Wife
All undisturbed
I read in peace
My Christmas present
For a niece.
It done,
I quickly seize another
And skim
The present for my brother.
But scarcely is a third begun,
(A Christmas present for my son)
Than all along the railway track
Squares of light
Illume the black.
And there
Inside each lighted square
I see a stay-at-home
Prepare
Each to the taste of her bread-winner
Supper,
High tea
Or high class dinner.
Homely fare, Eggs,
Finnan haddock,
Or wine-drenched
A la Fanny Cradock.
With basket, bags and package
I struggle to my feet,
Reality floods coldly back–
What
Are we
Going
To
Eat?
There’s enough to feed an army
To judge just by my looks.
What did I buy in Glasgow?
Books. Books. Books.
Books.
Books.

The publication of her childhood memories (Tak’ Tent o’ Time: Memories of a Post-Edwardian Edinburgh Childhood) gave my mother a great deal of pleasure. She particularly relished the words which appear on the verso of the title-page ‘The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work’. She had planned to publish her poetry next but never got round to it. This poem is also copyright Elaine Mary Wilson.