End of term – and on the second last day I note a tractor pulling a vast trailer-load of very ripe manure through Parliament Square.
Methinks the farmers (deeply unhappy about the proposed inheritance tax on their farms) were on their way to deliver a Christmas present to His Majesty’s Government.
But as I walk through security to New Palace Yard, for some reason my mind catapults back to another Christmas on a small Highland dairy farm. Except that it wasn’t.
Several years earlier my Grandmother had left her home town of Tain to go all the way to London to help my Aunt – who was a single mother – look after her two children. The Christmas I thought back on this week was the first time my Mother and Father and a six year old me ever went down to London. It was a huge adventure, one I have never forgotten.
There was no car. All we had was the grey Ferguson tractor. So my Father borrowed a dark red Morris Minor from friends living at Farr on the other side of Inverness and off we set – leaving (goodness knows why) in the evening.
“We’re going through the Grampians now!” It was the first time I’d ever heard the word – and with the hushed way my Mother said it over her shoulder to me, she might have been talking of the Alps or the Himalayas. This was exciting stuff. Goodness it was cold in the back of that van, but swaddled in a heap of blankets I soon fell asleep.
Pa put me to bed in Perth’s Station Hotel. “Listen, it’s a big railway station, you will hear the steam engines shunting all night.” And so I did.
Of the Borders and the Midlands I remember nothing – but then it was the next evening. “Look at that glow in the sky ahead, that is London!” said Ma. I can see it yet: t’was sheer magic. When we got to Granny’s flat (up four floors) I was given a boiled egg, and then it was time for bed again.
London! The place was extraordinary. A shop called Harrods was all lit up with Christmas lights. Inside, there was the wonder of what Ma idiosyncratically called “a moving staircase” (Harrods’ had some of London’s first escalators) and in the pet department something that would never be allowed today, a live monkey for sale. Ma and Pa bought me two white mice, which I instantly adored.
I could go on. Pa’s spinster Aunt Marme gifting me a starter Meccano set – a gas stove that you lit with a kind of torch thing – flying a glider in Kensington Gardens with my cousin Michael – the black buildings (“don’t run your hand along the filthy dirty railings!”) – and then after Christmas, the infamous London smog. On our way north again, taking in St Albans to see yet more relations, my Father had to crawl along the road with my Mother hanging out of the window watching for the kerb. The ‘pea-souper’ was really something. Believe me; I have the T-shirt.
So what was it that jogged my memory so very suddenly on my way into the House of Commons. The cold? The leaden sky? The Christmas lights? That load of manure? Perhaps the thought of how utterly astonished Ma and Pa would be to see wee Jamie walking into the place. Yes I think that was it.
The Christmas to remember.
Happy Christmas one and all.
End of Term Reflections from Jamie Stone MP
