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Chapters Indigo
Category:
Humor
Publisher: White Rose Content
ISBN-10: 0969954026
Copyright: Nov 14, 2012
ISBN-13: 9780969954088
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
Derek Bradley’s just like any other daft young lad growing up in the 1960s - unique. Through his brutally honest eyes and ears we recall just how funny it must have been to celebrate Christmas past in a small Yorkshire village.
The advent calendar in the Bradley household is full of adventures - Derek's first crack at carol singing ends with his first kiss. Dad's lost wage packet means a lean festive season, until a tiny law is quietly broken, and his search for holly leads to a ghostly encounter.
As Joseph in the school nativity play, Derek rewrites scripture and fuels a riot. Christmas magic is everywhere, until Granddad tries conjuring with flames at the dinner table.
Christmas Eve in church is anything but holy. In frosty bedrooms, damp village halls, and Santa's Grotto at the CO-OP, all is not calm, but it's certainly bright.
It’s how Christmas used to be – real, fun, and real funny.
“We like it!” BBC Radio
Award-winning author Dave Preston was born and raised in Old Malton, a small village in Yorkshire that provides the perfect setting for these hilarious stories.
Excerpt
I don’t like school much, except, maybe, when it’s getting close to Christmas, cos we don’t do proper lessons then. And one year we had a new teacher. Our proper teacher Miss Gower, was old, and she’d been in hospital having some very close veins taken out or summat, and it had gone wrong so she was still off, and we had a spare teacher come to us from York. Miss McDougal, and she was a bit funny. I don’t think she was all there, two cups short of a tea set as granny would say. Eric Smith said she was from Scotland so maybe they’re all like that up there. And she was a bit dramatic.
The first morning she made us push all the desks back and then she pulled the record player out of the teacher’s cupboard. Miss Gower never did that cos she didn’t know how to work it. She had us doing Musical Movement, which meant she put a record on and we ran about.
“Let the music flow through your body and the movement will come naturally.” First record was the Lone Ranger music so me and Brian Duggleby went galloping round, slapping our legs, giddy-up there! But Miss McDougal stopped us and said “Boys, boys, that is no way to treat Rossini.” And she was wrong there cos his horse was called Silver.
Anyway, today she started talking about Christmas and said we were going to do summat very special. She started asking us what the true meaning of Christmas is, and cos she’d only been here a week she didn’t know all our names. She’d point at you and say, “Tell me Richard,” Robert, miss, “Tell me Robert, what’s the true meaning of Christmas,” and Robert Jackson, who’s another two cups short of a tea-set says “Lights, miss.” Which I thought was funny cos lights or anything bright is the last thing you think about with Robert Jackson.
I was sat with me mate, Bodger Thomas. Miss Gower had separated me and Bodge back when school started cos we were always talking and messin’ about, but this new teacher didn’t know that so we’d got back together. “Home for Christmas,” said Bodge.
The thing about Bodger is that he gets very nervous when a teacher asks him anything. He’s not thick and he usually knows the right answer, but when they ask him to say it on his own in front of the whole class he seizes up. He starts to stutter and he goes all red and sweaty, and he gets in a real mess with himself. Takes him all day to calm down sometimes, so Miss Gower never asked him stuff on his own.
Miss McDougal asked Sara Blenkinsop about Christmas next, and she said presents. Wrong. And then she set off towards the back of the class, towards me and Bodger.
“Oh no, I bet she asks me next!” Bodge says, digging me in the ribs. Shurrup! I said, you’ll be alright. He was starting to panic.
“Oh no, bloody hell no, she’s coming straight for us! Quick, stick yer hand up,” he said, “head her off at the pass.” Shurrup, she won’t ask ya. Look, she’s walking t’other way now.
“So tell us all, what is the true meaning of Christmas, er, you!” and she swung round and pointed straight at Bodge.
“Aw Jesus,” he said.
“Yes, that’s right,” says Miss McDougal, “Jesus. The true meaning of Christmas, children, is Jesus. And so what we’re going to do today and for the rest of this week is prepare a nativity play!”
“A what?” says Bodge. It’s Mary and Joseph and them lot, I said, in the stable with baby Jesus, you know, like they have outside church. On the grass outside the church every year there’s a manger and straw and these dummies standing about, like religious scarecrows.
They have paper mache faces and this year Joseph was kneeling down, but somebody had kicked his head in. It might have been Bodger come to think of it.
So anyway, Miss McDougal pulled out a big trunk full of costumes and opened up the drama cupboard where we keep all the pretend swords and stuff, and she starts to pick the team. It’s a musical she said, so the good singers get the best parts. Bodger can’t sing for toffee so he got himself a cushy number back stage as her special helper. Most of the girls were stable animals, such as cows and sheep and a few hens. Then she picked three lads for wise men and three more for shepherds, but then Jennifer Baker, who can be a right gobby little sod, started giving her some grief. She said “Never mind Scotland but round here women can be shepherds anorl,” cos her mother was one. So Jennifer became a fourth shepherd and grabbed herself a big crook from the cupboard.
Skinny little Wendy Somerset, or Wetton Wendy as we called her, a right teacher’s pet, got to play Mary, and that was a daft choice cos Mary never wore glasses. Course, she was capped, little miss cleverclogs, smiling fit to make you sick she was. Nobody likes her.
“And now then, finally, for our Jospeph we’ll have…” and her finger went sweeping round the class, and all the lads who hadn’t yet been picked looked at the floor, and I did anorl. “You!” she said, and when I looked up her finger was pointing right between me eyes. Oh God, I said. “No, Joseph!” says Bodger, laughing and giving me a shove, so when she’d turned round I flicked his boil with me ruler.
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