A Stroke of the Pen, page 4
Father Christmas considered. His sleigh had been quite heavy when all the toys were packed on it – he could hardly push it out of the garage.
‘Yes,’ he decided.
The next day he was looking very embarrassed again, while the young man tried to calm down the manager of the long-distance lorry firm. Fortunately, the man was on the telephone, but you could hear his voice all around the room, he was that angry. At last, the Job Shop man put the telephone down.
‘Very good,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Tell me, how did you manage to park a sixteen-wheel, thirty-ton lorry on the roof of a three-storey house?’
‘Isn’t that normal?’ said Father Christmas. ‘I always park on the roof.’
He looked so hurt that the keen young man relented.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’d help matters a lot if you wore something a bit more . . . er . . . respectable.’
‘What’s wrong with red britches with furry turnups and a pointed hat with a woolly bobble?’ demanded Father Christmas. ‘It’s never caused any complaints in the past.’
‘All right, all right. We’ll try once more. There’s a Christmas vacancy at the local toy factory. I shouldn’t think you could mess that up.’
‘Well, you messed that up,’ said the keen young man, who didn’t look quite so keen now, as he apologized to the toy factory manager and put down the phone.
‘I didn’t like making toy soldiers and machine-guns,’ said Father Christmas. ‘Unpleasant things.’
‘Yes, but wooden Noah’s Arks and teddy bears,’ said the young man. ‘What sort of things are they to give to kids? I’m sorry, Mr Christmas, but you are what we in the trade call “unemployable”, and I can’t think of anything suitable for you.’
Father Christmas was just leaving when the telephone rang. The Job Shop man picked it up and listened.
‘Oh yes?’ he said. ‘Go on. Fat, you say. Jolly? I see. Ability to say Ho! Ho! Ho! an advantage. Well, I’ll certainly see what I can do for you. In fact, I think I might have the very man.’
‘Mr Christmas,’ he said, putting down the telephone. ‘How would you like to work in a department store?’
Father Christmas arrived home whistling and looking very jolly.
‘How did the new job go?’ said Mrs Christmas.
‘Very well indeed,’ he said, sitting down at the table. ‘It’s dead easy. I have to sit in this sort of fairy grotto affair, and a queue of children come and tell me what they want for Christmas. I don’t quite know why.’
‘I hope no one complained about your nice red suit it took me so long to make,’ said Mrs Christmas.
‘No, it’s funny, but I got the impression the manager was very pleased with it,’ said Father Christmas. ‘He gave me a bonus because of it, and I get a free lunch and two tea breaks. They all know my name, too: “Hullo, Father Christmas,” they say. Mind you, I can’t help wondering what it’s all in aid of.’
Mrs Christmas plonked a plate down in front of him and kissed his white curls.
‘They obviously just like you,’ she said.
A Partridge in a Post Box
On Christmas Day, a large and oddly shaped parcel arrived in the tiny post office of Collip St Pancras.
Albert Button the postman took one look at it and said: ‘I can’t deliver that – it’s much too big! Anyway, what is it?’
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ said the Postmaster, ‘but it’s a partridge in a pear tree.’
And sure enough, from inside the brown paper and sticky tape came a rustling and grumbling noise such as a small angry bird might make after spending all night in a parcel.
So Albert Button put it on the front of his bike and pedalled all the way up to a big house on a hill, and the door was opened by an extremely beautiful young lady who gave him a tip.
On Boxing Day there was a crate full of cooing noises.
‘Express delivery,’ said the Postmaster. ‘I understand it’s two turtle doves.’
The next day, he peered through the basket-work and saw three fat little birds wearing berets and drinking red wine. One of them was playing an accordion.
‘I suppose these are the three French hens,’ said Albert, heaving them onto his bike.
On the fourth day of Christmas . . .
‘Her True-love never thought about the poor old postman,’ panted Albert, wheezing away up the hill with a parcel containing four very heavy calling birds.
Next day, of course, there were only five golden rings, which the young lady was very pleased with. She smiled at Albert and he whistled all the way home.
He didn’t even mind about delivering the six geese which on the following morning were a-laying all over his mailbag. He was more careful with the seven swans a-swimming.
‘They can break a man’s arm with a blow of their nose,’ he said.
On the eighth day of Christmas he said to the eight maids a-milking: ‘Now look, ladies, there isn’t no room at all for you all on my bike. I’ll just have to carry you one at a time, like, on the crossbar.’ And he blushed.
By the ninth day Albert had got into the swing of the thing.
‘Right then, lads,’ he said to the drummers, who were standing around rather aimlessly with penny stamps stuck all over them. ‘All together now – huh-one, huh-two, huh-one-two-three-four . . .’
On the tenth day he rode ahead proudly on his bike while behind him the ten pipers played ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again?’.
On the eleventh day he waltzed, fox-trotted and tangoed up the hill with the eleven ladies dancing, in particular a rather fetching lady with black hair who gave him a kiss.
But on the twelfth day of Christmas the Postmaster said: ‘That’s right. They’ve got lost.’
‘Lost?’ said Albert. ‘Lost? How can you lose twelve lords a-leaping?’
‘They’re probably a-leaping in a goods siding at Crewe,’ said the Postmaster. ‘British Rail has spent all morning looking. They’ve found all kinds of things, but no lords. They did find a small baron in a letterbox near Bath, but I told them it wasn’t one of ours and they put him back.’
‘This is terrible!’ said Albert. ‘She’ll be so disappointed. Perhaps she’ll think her True-love forgot to send them!’
He leapt onto his regulation bicycle and pedalled madly off towards the Head Post Office in Blackbury, where he and all the other postmen – who had all heard about the strange presents – sifted quickly through the parcels.
There was not even one knight, and not so much as the smell of an earl.
Albert Button sat down on a pile of letters with his head in his hands. He looked blearily at the other postmen. There were six. Add the Telephone Manager and his engineers, that’s nine, he thought. And the Head Postmaster and his deputy and me makes twelve.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, standing up, ‘this is a drastic situation. Is there a place round here where we can hire some silk knee breeches and a dozen coronets?’
On the twelfth day of Christmas the young lady in the house on the hill looked out of her window to see a large trampoline being hauled into position on the front lawn.
‘Right, lads!’ hissed Albert. ‘Leap for your lives!’
Up and down they went, spinning in cartwheels and somersaults and figures of eight. Boing! Spring! Bounce!
‘We’re lords,’ said Albert pointedly, as he sailed past the window upside down. ‘Make no mistake about it. Ain’t we, lads?’
She smiled and waved to them.
On the thirteenth day of Christmas, she got married to her True-love, and the Best Man – who stood there in his best uniform, his buttons all polished and the five gold rings in his hand – was Albert Button. There was a lord’s coronet wedged tightly onto his head. He had to put his cap on over the top of it. But he was smiling.
The New Father Christmas
In the manager’s office of the big Christmas toy factory at the North Pole, complicated industrial negotiations were just about to break down.
‘No,’ said Father Christmas.
‘Is that your last word?’ said Sean O’Haircut, the head gnome.
‘Yes,’ said Father Christmas, folding his arms.
So Sean O’Haircut blew his shop steward’s whistle and went out to the notice board in Father Christmas’s huge toy workshop and stuck up tshe dreaded notice:
Owing to the breakdown of talks between management (Father Christmas) and the representatives of GELPA (Gnomes, Elves, Leprechauns and Pixies Association), RNRAASP (Red-Nosed Reindeers and Allied Sleigh-Pullers) and UFJS (the Union of Fat Jolly Snowmen), a strike is hereby declared.
SIGNED Sean O’Haircut, Works Convenor
PS: Strike-breakers will jolly well get turned into frogs.
SIGNED Sean O’Haircut
One by one, the machines stopped. The fairy toymakers downed tools, clocked off at the magic cuckoo-clock, and went home.
Father Christmas was sitting with his head in his hands when Jack Frost bustled in with a flurry of snowflakes. ‘Oh dear,’ he said.
‘We’re going to have to cancel Christmas,’ said Father Christmas. ‘The reindeers say the sleigh’s too heavy with all these extra children in the world, the gnomes say they’re overworked and underpaid – oh dear, oh dear . . .’
‘It’s that Rudolph I blame,’ said Jack Frost, frostily. ‘He is such a red-nose reindeer, after all.’
One of Father Christmas’s twenty-five telephones rang. It was the BBC. Then someone else rang up. There was a long conversation which mostly consisted of sighs from Father Christmas.
‘Someone wants me to go on a television show with Sean O’Haircut and – er, a young lady called Raquel Welch, is it? And a lot of other people. He seemed quite a super fellow for a television man,’ he said to Jack Frost. ‘He sounded as if he was a relative of yours.’
Soon the horrible news was all over the world: Christmas would be cancelled due to industrial disputes. Christmas decorations were taken down, television companies had to think of something to put on the television instead of boring old films, and a lot of little children just cried and cried and cried.
And on top of it all the snow that Jack Frost had specially ordered for the season fell and made everywhere look as white as the inside of a ping-pong ball – but it was ruined because there were no Christmas robins or fat jolly snowmen – they were on strike.
Father Christmas appeared on the News at Ten and said what with profits and the Freeze and everything, he couldn’t negotiate, and Sean O’Haircut went on Panorama and turned Robin Day into a parrot.
That rather amused Father Christmas who was sitting in front of the fire and watching television.
‘I’m getting too old for this lark,’ he thought. ‘I’m about four hundred years past retirement age, after all. I think I’ll retire to the Costa Bombe and make way for a younger man.’
So the next week the new Father Christmas turned up for the job. He was tall and thin and fairly young, with long hair, rimless glasses, and a necklace of Tibetan goat-bells. He wore flared red trousers and his beard was quite the oddest thing the goblin toymakers had ever seen.
He sacked the reindeers because his sleigh was peer driven.
He called everybody ‘man’, which really annoyed the elves, and he kept snapping his fingers.
He started to ‘modernize and streamline’ the toyshop, which meant sacking practically everybody and replacing them with machinery because, he said, ‘modern toys are where it’s at, man. No one wants your wooden Noah’s Arks.’
‘This is getting me down,’ said a snowman called Brown, when the Works committee met in the canteen.
‘He keeps wanting me to make working antiballistic missiles, whatever they are,’ grumbled an old gnome.
‘I wonder if we just might have done a silly thing, comrades,’ said Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer.
They all looked at Sean O’Haircut, who blushed. ‘Oh, all right,’ he mumbled, ‘I’ll go and see the old boy. He wasn’t as bad as this one. I’ll say that for him.’
So it was that early on Christmas Eve Sean O’Haircut arrived on a sun-baked beach on the Costa Bombe, where old Father Christmas was sunbathing in a pair of red swimming-trunks.
They had a long chat, and soon they were on a special plane bound for the North Pole.
‘Right,’ said Father Christmas, walking into the toyshop and rubbing his hands, ‘what’s been going on here, then? What’s that machine doing? And where are my reindeers? WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS?’
Five minutes later there was a terrific row in the manager’s office and the new Father Christmas came flying out.*
‘Right,’ said Father Christmas, putting on his red fur-lined jacket and glancing at the clock. ‘We’ve only got a few hours; we’d better get a move on.’
‘Yes, sir!’ chorused the elves.
‘And what with profits and whatnot I reckon you’ll all get a pretty big Christmas bonus,’ said Father Christmas, who was no fool.
And they did.
The Great Blackbury Pie
This is the story of the great Blackbury pie, and the amazing events that happened in Gritshire on Christmas Day, 1850.
You see, there lived in Blackbury – a pleasant little town really – a millionaire called Albert Wincepartner. He was the mayor, and he had made his money selling rabbits to Australia. He was small, round and red-faced.
One day early in December he was strolling along the High Street with his friend Blanket, the town clerk.
‘You know, Blanket,’ he said, ‘at this time of year I can’t help thinking about the poor people who won’t have any Christmas dinner.’
‘Ar,’ said Blanket, who was thinking of something else entirely.
‘I reckon,’ said the mayor, ‘we should do something. Take a note of this, Blanket. I’ll pay for – oh, a hundred pies for the poor of Gritshire, each pie to be a foot across. Pies at Christmas – just right. See to it.’
But Blanket wasn’t paying attention. When he got back to his office he told his assistant, who told a secretary who went and told Mr Gwilliam Plum, a noted baker.
‘One pie a hundred feet across?’ said Plum. ‘Are you sure? But – well – a hundred feet across . . . !’
Mr Plum thought about it. A smile crept across his face. This was his big moment.
Next day he was very busy. He rounded up all the bakers and butchers in Blackbury and told them of his plan.
‘It’ll be a magnificent pie,’ he cried. ‘A King of Pies! The biggest pie there has ever been! A pie so delicious . . .’
A small man in a high black hat and with a thick cigar in his mouth strolled up.
‘You don’t want cooks,’ he said. ‘You want an engineer for a pie that size. My name’s Isambard Brunel, and, since I’m not building any ships or railways at present, I think I’ll turn my attention to the really hard problem of building a one-hundred-foot pie.’
And he did. He cleared a big area on the outskirts of the town and set a thousand men to work to build the biggest oven in the world.
Brunel lit another cigar. ‘Where,’ he said, ‘are we going to get a one-hundred-foot pie dish? It’d have to be the size of a gasometer!’
He looked towards Blackbury Gas Works and grinned. A moment later, fifty men headed in that direction with a large saw.
Meanwhile hundreds of carts were coming up the hill, laden with supplies.
‘Five hundred tons of flour,’ said Mr Plum, ticking them off on a long list. ‘Three tons of salt, two tons of pepper, two hundred tons of onions, one bay leaf . . .’
The gasometer was manhandled into place, upside down, and two hundred pastry cooks started to lay the foundations of the pie. Then more carts came, from butchers for miles around, with beef, mutton, chicken, goose, lamb, bacon and dripping. They shovelled the lot in, and the great lid was lowered into place.
Then Brunel lit the oven with the end of his cigar.
‘Amazing!’ said Plum the baker, running up to the hastily constructed Pie Office. ‘I’ve a telegram here that says the Queen is coming!’
Everyone stood to attention, and Mr Brunel at once started work on designs for a fifty-foot royal pie slicer.
By now, the pie was a big attraction. While it stood steaming on its great oven, small boys roasted chestnuts in the fire. A fair had grown up around it. Sightseers were taken on tours round the warm crust, for half-a-crown a time, while the Blackbury Voluntary Silver Band played a selection of waltzes.
Mr Plum went to bed on Christmas Eve, and dreamed of the fame that would be his when Queen Victoria cut the pie. But he woke up sweating.
‘Good heavens!’ he said, struggling into his trousers. ‘The egg-cup! We forgot about the egg-cup.’
Down Blackbury High Street ran Plum the baker, in his trousers and bare feet, just as the sun was rising . . .
The great bulk of the giant pie loomed over the town. Plum started to bang desperately on the Pie Office door, and it was opened by Brunel in his nightshirt.
‘Wassamatter?’
‘We forgot about the egg-cup!’ panted Plum.
‘What’s so important about an egg-cup?’ said Brunel, rubbing his eyes and staring up at the pie. A dull rumble was coming from it.
‘You’ve got to put an egg-cup in a pie to let the air out when it’s cooking. If you don’t, it explodes!’
‘Gracious!’ By now the sun was up and people were flocking towards the pie ground. Brunel thought about the damage a monster pie could do, and shuddered.
He rushed to the oven and listened. There was certainly something going on inside the thick crust.
‘Stand back!’ he cried. ‘I think it’s going to—!’
. . . rumble rumble Rumble RUMBLE
BANG!
Red-hot pastry scythed through haystacks ten miles away. Molten gravy shot up like a waterspout. A lump of beef and onions took the top off the town hall. Peas whizzed about like bullets. The great top crust – with no egg-cup in it – was never seen again, and in Shropshire there was a short sharp shower of suet.
