As this will be my last blog before Christmas I thought I’d enter into the spirit and give you a little extract from my book ‘Sisters‘. It’s Christmas Eve at the Fauld family’s cottage and three year old Sofie (a.k.a. Monster) is really getting the hang of things. Happy Holiday.

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            “This is the way the gentleman rides,” crooned Annie, “a gallop, a gallop, a gallop!”

            Little Dannie almost shrieked with delight as Annie’s knee jolted up and down beneath her in a fair imitation of the ride of a galloping horse.  Dannie was besotted.

            “This is the way the lady rides,” Annie giggled, with Dannie’s fascinated eyes locked on hers, “a trot, a trot, a trot!”

            Dannie had found a new game and she loved it.  She held Annie’s hands firmly, as if they really were the reins of a horse, while beneath her Annie’s knee became the mounts of a bewildering variety of people from the Parson and farmer, to the merchant, whose horse went ‘a clink, a clink, a clink!’ because of the money bags.  But there was one character the little one couldn’t get enough of.

            “Do dunk,” she demanded.  “Gen, gen, do dunk!”

            “You want the drunkard again?” Annie giggled.  “We only just had him once.”

            “Gen, gen, gen, do dunk!”

            Our au-pair, Gaia, looked nervous once more.  She was on the edge of her seat ready to intervene if things went wrong and she needed to rescue her charge.  She really wasn’t sure that a woman capable of forgetting who she was for two years should be allowed to play rough with her baby, even if Debbie-mum persisted in thinking that Dannie was her baby really and seemed perfectly at ease with the situation.

            “OK then, you asked for it,” grinned Annie, quietly shifting her grip from Dannie’s hands to her waist.  “Hold on tight, now.  This is the way the drunkard rides: wuperty-aye, wuperty-aye,” the knee began a distinctly drunken side to side motion, “and ….. into the ditch!” whereupon Annie’s leg straightened into a steep slide, so that Dannie shot backwards towards the floor until deftly caught and restored to her mount.  Gaia relaxed again while Dannie clapped her hands, giggling hysterically.  Sofie looked up indulgently from drawing on the floor, prepared to tolerate such childishness in a sister who, after all, was still less than two years old.  Annie and Danielle had bonded big-time, but Monster remained firmly loyal to the woman she now called simply ‘My girlfriend’.

            It was Christmas Eve and the ‘Cottage’ living room was like Santa’s grotto.  Debbie-mum had always gone overboard with the decorations: a reaction to austere childhood Christmases with parents who thought Scrooge was a bit of a spendthrift.  But this time, much to her delight, she’d been aided and abetted by a near fanatic.  Because three-year-old Monster had now properly got the hang of Christmas and had egged her mum on to even greater excess.  In return she’d been positively encouraged to join in.  Marty-mum, in a rash moment, had shown her how to make paper chains out of strips of gummed paper.  I remember Roshie and me making the odd one when we were little.  But Sofie had begun production on an almost industrial scale and woe-betide any Mum who didn’t use every last link.  So the room was positively festooned.  The prime example of what you might call the Monster effect though, was the tree.  As ever, Deb had bought the tallest that would fit.  In fact, she’d had to trim it a bit to stop it hitting the ceiling.  Once it was properly up she and Sofie had really gone to town on its decoration, with six-foot Marty helping with the very top, as she was the only one who could reach.  And now a rather startled looking angel was having to come to terms with the fact that once again, for at least the twentieth year running, she had the top of a prickly pine tree shoved up her dress!  The result was a peculiar multi-layered effect.

            Sofie had clearly gone for the idea of ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it’.  We’d acquired quite a few tree decorations over the years which lived in a couple of large cardboard boxes that spent most of the year asleep in a wardrobe upstairs.  Normally, Deb would bring them down and we’d assemble a tasteful selection before putting the rest back to bed.  But that was not the Monster way.  The result was that any greenery had been totally obscured up to the height a small girl could reach on tiptoes.  Instead, we got a dense mass of tinsel, baubles and other random ornaments, topped off with flashing lights.  Above that, the rest of the tree was a sparser, more restrained affair although as high up as Debbie-mum could reach, there were numerous extra intrusions for which Sofie had pestered and Mum had included for a quiet life, delighted to see her darling joining in with such gusto.  The boxes, meanwhile, had been taken back up virtually empty.  Dannie had tried to take things off again at first, but she eventually got the idea that nice things went on the tree.  So whenever Mum wasn’t looking she’d waddle off and reappear with suggestions of her own, including CDs, her socks and on one occasion, much to Monster’s alarm, her bear, Buh!

            Sofie had also got her head round something else: on Christmas morning, Santa would come bringing presents.  She definitely liked that idea.  Presents were good: the more the merrier, as far as she was concerned.  Marty-mum had tried to explain to her that there was a catch: only good little girls got presents.  Little girls who were naughty, or who didn’t go to bed when they were told, who annoyed Gaia or, well, insert the sin of your choice!  Those girls got cinders.  Sofie remained unimpressed, partly because against all the evidence she was firmly convinced that she was a good girl and partly, I suspect, because she didn’t actually know what cinders were.  We did have an open fire in the living room, but it hadn’t been lit for some years while we had inquisitive little ones around again, who might not be too cautious or steady on their feet.  Oddly, Monster didn’t seem much interested in what might be in the presents.  She looked blank if you asked her what she’d like for Christmas, or just answered, “Pwesents!”

            “No-one, but absolutely no-one is to buy her a damn drum!” Marty-mum had grumphed at Charlie Hides, the drummer in both of Debbie’s bands.  He’d been my drum teacher and bought me my first drum kit, but Mum had never quite been sure she approved.

            “Noted, Marty,” he grinned.  “Wouldn’t dream …..”

            “Dwum, Dum!” parroted Dannie, with Mum mouthing something to the effect of ‘Oh, Hell!”, but less polite.