UNHAPPY CHRISTMASES

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 December 1934, Page 4

UNHAPPY CHRISTMASES

YULETIDE EXPERIENCES. Few, if any, men have spent Christmas under more varied and romantic conditions than Six* William Maxwell, the well-known war correspondent. “The Christmas of 1907,” he says, “I passed in a railway train very miserably. I had gone to Stockholm for the funeral of King Oscar and had had a memorable interview with the new King and was racing home for Christmas. But the snows descended in avalanches, and train and boat were hours behind, and I spent Christmas Eve in Berlin and Christmas Day in the train.”

The next year Christmas found him in the Black Sea in a German ship. “There was only one other passenger,” he says, “and yet for us on Christmas Day the table was laden with good cheer, the saloon was gay with holly and evergreen, and the Christmas-tree was heavy with gifts. And after dinner tlrfe lights were lowered and we drank to absent friends, and the stewards from the gallery above us sang sweet carols that sent our hearts leaping over Black Sea. and Mediterranean and Atlantic to England and home.” The following Christmas found him among the guests of a ruler of Gwalior in India, living luxuriously in tents and feasting right merrily with a delightful host who drove his motorcar, wore khaki at breakfast, and in the afternoon was a radiant Oriental potentate on a bejewelled elephant.

On his other many adventurous Christmases he spent one in beleaguered Ladysmith. “Our Christmas rare,” he says, “was limited. Potatoes sold at auction for a shilling each; carrots for sevenpence; eggs were a shilling each; a threepenny packet of cigarettes, 3/6; and whisky, £7 a bottle.”

There was no element of amusement in a Christinas Day of which Mr Heath Robinson, the “Punch” artist, tells the following story: — “One Christmas morning—it was bitterly cold and drizzling with rain and sleet —I was taken by an uncle to Madame Tussaud’s, and from there, of all places in the world, to the London Monument, which we scaled to the top. “I was leaning my arms on the rail and wondering if it were possible to find anything on earth more depressing than the view before me, whe nturning round to address my uncle I found, to my horror, that he had forgotten me and gone home. The door had slammed, and there was 1, forgotten and doomed to spend my Christmas, not only dinnerless, but foodless, with what patience I could muster on the monument:

’ “The English language. was not made to describe such misery as was mine until the charwoman came on Boxing Day to polish the golden bristles and set me free.” Marshal Joffre had painful memories of a Christmas Day spent in beleagured Paris. He was a youth of twenty at the time. "By December 20.” he records, “rats made their appearance on the market, costing a franc each —‘large and fat.’ Those whom Providence had favoured with litters of kittens were advised by public announcement not to waste them. Special butchers’ shops were opened for the sale of cat and dog meat, and a tender dog cutlet cost a couple of francs. “On Christmas Day a tough thin roast chicken sold for £2/10/-, ami nt Ihe Palais Royal roast ass cost tho equivalent of 10/- a pound; a small calf’s head, a sovereign; a pint of milk, a shilling; and fresh butter, a sovereign a pound; while fifteen pence was gladly paid for a sewer rat. “1 was too poor at. the time,” the Marshal adds, “to indulge in even tho cheapest of these luxuries, even a modest portion of cat. meat. My only food that Christmas Day consisted of a couple of crusts of black bread, washed down with water.”