OUR first Christmas in a new house.
The estate around us was still a building site. Our floors were bare black tiles, cold to bare feet.
The walls were grey plaster. And since they would be painted or papered over, children were free to draw on them with pencils and crayons.
My twin brother Roger and I were five years old, utterly preoccupied with anticipation of Christmas since Halloween.
My father put the Christmas tree in a corner by the window where one day our first television would be installed. He ran the lights for the tree from a lightbulb socket with some device of his own improvisation.
The Christmas cards from relations who knew our new address lined the mantlepiece.
And diagonally across the ceiling hung the concertina-ed decorations of flimsy coloured tissue.
We had questions about how Santa was going to get down that chimney.
Would he not get soot in his beard? Wouldn’t the ashes and grate still be hot? Was it wise to light the fire at all on Christmas Eve?
My mother, conscious of there being no other heating in the house, assured us that Santa had powers of reshaping and resizing himself, and he was sure to get in safely, to deposit our presents round the tree.
We hardly slept at all on the night of Christmas eve but did sincerely try because there was a danger, as it was explained to us, that if we didn’t sleep, Santa wouldn’t come.
It’s hard to force yourself to sleep. I think we passed out, exhausted from trying.
We woke into winter darkness, a novelty in itself and hurried downstairs.
Under the tree, nose to nose, were two large brown plastic helicopters.
I picked mine up. It was so light it was clearly designed to fly.
Sure, look at the way the blades spin, wheee wheee.
We stood side by side on the third stair up to launch them. Together we flicked the blades into a spin with a finger and cast our helicopters into the air, expecting them to arc round the room the way a paper aeroplane would.
Well, that was the expectation.
Gravity didn’t allow a moment for our helicopters to discover buoyancy.
The laws of nature were not relaxing for Christmas, whatever the rest of us were doing. Instead the two plastic helicopters, though almost as light as air, dropped flat onto the cold tiles of the living room floor and shattered.
Some Christmas this was turning out to be.
Mum and Dad were forgiving. Given the day that it was, we were to be consoled rather than scolded.
Besides, they hadn’t cost them anything. Santa had brought them. The plastic shards went into the bin.
I don’t know why stories like that come back decades later but this one did.
During those intervening decades the military helicopter was a continuous presence in the sky over Belfast. We got so used to them that we hardly noticed them.
Then the helicopters went away and became a little fascinating again in their own right without the connotations of war.
One day, an adult now, indeed a middle-aged man, I saw in a toyshop window a little remote control helicopter.
When Maureen asked me what I would like for Christmas that year I said I’d like a remote control helicopter. She said, you’re joking. What do you really want?
We were sitting in our favourite local restaurant for Sunday breakfasts.
“Hang on,” I said. I turned to the man sitting at the next table with his wife and I said, “Excuse me but can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“What would you rather have as a Christmas present? A new shirt or a remote control helicopter?”
He smiled. “No contest,” he said. “The helicopter.”
“See?”
Maureen was learning something about male psychology.
Christmas came and with it, under the tree, just for me, a parcel that unwrapped revealed a little black and yellow helicopter with a charging unit and a remote control device with two wee thumb levers.
I plugged in the charger. Then when she came down I set the helicopter on the floor and gently teased some movement out of it through the wee levers at my thumbs.
At first it shuddered and the blades turned sluggishly. A little more application and the blades began to whirr and the helicopter rose gently, to hover in the middle of the living room.
A miracle!
I relaxed the levers and the helicopter sagged in the air. I increased the pressure and it rose again. It was responding to my commands.
“Be careful now,” she said.
A little more application and it rose faster still.
Ooops. But it had already engaged with an antique glass bowl lampshade, where suddenly it lost the will to live and without pausing to consider my feelings, dropped to the floor, grazing the edge of a coffee table on the way down.
“Reliving your childhood?” she said.
Almost to the letter, in fact.
