The Ghosts of Christmas Past

by Andy Conway

“They dress just like me,” she said. “Like us.”

  “They’re in costume. It’s a... it’s a play.” A pretence, he thought. A pretence about a happy Dickensian Christmas. The good old days.

  Happy children watched and begged their parents for a coin to put in the tin.

  Fred took it all in. Something so familiar about this.

  A boy came through the crowd, ignoring the brass band, walking straight for Belle and Fred, a boy in a tweed knickerbocker suit and baker boy cap. He stood before them, gazing up at Belle. She looked down on him and pushed her hood from her face.

  Fred stared, paralyzed, and though The First Noel droned on, the world stood still, as if the entire fate of Earth hinged on the look that passed between this boy and this woman.

  “Hello, young boy,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Fred,” the boy said. “What’s your name?”

  He held out his hand.

  Belle’s mouth fell open. Before she could respond, a woman came rushing up.

  “Fred! There you are!” She came and yanked the boy away and hugged him. “You are not to walk off like that! I thought you were lost!”

  The man in a tweed suit and joined the boy and his mother, smiling with relief.

  Fred stared, stunned. “Oh, I’ve missed them so much.”

  “Your parents,” Belle said. “That was you.”

  The platform revolving slow, a carousel starting up.

  “I remember you!” Fred cried. “I remember this.”

  “You were such a beautiful boy.”

  “This is my last memory of them.”

  She squeezed his hand. “They are gone? I mean, they will be gone? Oh, it’s so difficult to think of.”

  “They died in a motor car crash. Not long after this.”

  He had met himself, as a child, and not recognized his older self. How could he have? Just that vivid memory of his mother and father finding him, angry, loving, desperately hugging him again. The beautiful dark-eyed Dickensian woman in the cloud of steam. This, all of this.

  “I can’t control it,” he said. “I’m losing it.”

  She gripped both his fists in hers and held them to her breast. “Don’t let go of me, Fred Smith. Don’t lose me.”

  He fought against the spinning, whirling, swooning platform, the brass echoing, melting, all of it being sucked into a whirlpool. Her dark eyes on his. Hold onto her, he thought. Control this curse for once in your life, damn you. Hold onto this woman and don’t let go.

  Take her with y—

  — 34 —

  “HALLO!” FORSTER CALLED. “Hilly ho! Anyone?”

  His voice echoed back to him, forlorn and desolate. It proper spooked him if he was honest. Graveyards in the daytime were bad enough but at night, with a mist, and with all his friends running off and leaving him alone, it just wasn’t bearable.

  Charles’ lantern was there on the ground, next to the gravestone. He picked it up, still alight, and felt a little safer with two lanterns. But even the light of both of them couldn’t illuminate Charles, Mrs Hudson, Fred or Belle. They had all somehow slipped him in the mist.

  A strange mist it was too. A fog like nothing he’d ever seen. It had come in all of a sudden and hung in the air. It was warm instead of cold and clammy, and it almost had the smell of coal about it, sort of sulphurous. It was more like the clouds of steam you got at a train station.

  Perhaps this was what it was like here in Birmingham, with so many houses devoted to workshop and factory activity. There had been a dark cloud hanging over the city all day from the chimneys, and perhaps it turned to this smoky fog at night.

  He wandered through it and found the edge of land where they’d walked into the graveyard earlier at the start of their mission. Such a funny old to do: the Cratchit boy, scaring off those criminals and then the graveside revelations. He managed to hold both lanterns in one hand and patted the wad of money at his chest. At least that was safe. But in this part of town. He needed to get back to civilization as soon as possible.

  He retraced his steps through the dark streets and thought he must be the only man out at night, except for the woman he passed who was sleeping in a doorway, settling down for the night with a blanket around her.

  He shivered and walked on and tried to forget her. Were there no workhouses? And still, he had such an enormous amount of money on his person. But it was not his; it was Charles’, and it was to be invested in a very important business venture. It wasn’t his money to go handing out to all and sundry, and surely doing so would only draw attention to himself from all sorts of criminals and ne’er-do-wells. And wasn’t that what he’d only just rescued the money from?

  He came to New Street and the welcoming glow of gaslight. The Shakespeare Tavern on the corner sounded boisterous. A carol vibrating on the windows. He could nip in there for a pint of ale. But not with so much money on his person. That was a recipe for disaster. An ale to loosen his tongue and he’d be telling all and sundry about his adventure tonight and before you knew it, you’d be pickpocketed or held at knifepoint. There was just no trusting anyone in the world at all.

  He shuddered and passed on, letting the lanterns fall to his knee now that he didn’t need them to light his way. His arm was aching terribly.

  If only Charles and the others had returned via some other route, he could tell them all the story of his dangerous odyssey to get back here, all alone and at the mercy of the worst criminals in the Froggery.

  He quickened his step towards the theatre, eager to be reunited with his merry band of adventurers. He could regale them with all the tales of his adventure and they would surely think him quite the hero. He was sure they hadn’t experienced anything to rival his adventure.

  — 35 —

  SNOW FALLING THROUGH gaslight. They were on a dark street of grand terracotta buildings. Another Christmas. Later, she felt.

  Dickens was bent over. “I feel quite dizzy,” he said.

  “Come along,” Mrs Hudson said, taking the stone steps through the arched doorway. He followed her inside the grand building. An empty reception hall. Yes, she knew this building. She’d visited it many times for talks and readings.

  The sense of a hubbub deeper inside. She climbed the stairs, her skirts swishing about her ankles. There, the grand meeting room. She pushed the brass door handle. It creaked as she entered and slipped inside. Charles remained in the doorway, peeping inside, and took off his top hat. A hundred or more people were seated inside. A few turned to look.

  The speaker standing at the lectern noted her and paused.

  He looked older and this, finally, was the man she knew as Charles Dickens: this was the man from the ten-pound note and every portrait of him. Frizzy hair and a long beard. Grizzled and worn.

  He came to the conclusion of his speech, his eyes on her. “And thus I say, a mere spoken word — a mere syllable thrown into the air — may go on reverberating through illimitable space forever and ever...”

  He bowed. Polite applause crackled. All the men in the room stood and clamoured to congratulate him. Charles Dickens pushed through the crowd, his eyes on her and her alone.

  She cast a wary glance back at the younger Dickens in the doorway looking on, astonished, and felt it was vitally important that these two men did not meet.

  Charles Dickens pushed through the crowd of glad-handing men. “It’s you, isn’t it? The Ghost of Christmas Past?”

  “Now, Charles, you know full well I’m not a ghost.”

  “Why have you returned?”

  “I can’t control this. It takes me where it will.”

  “It’s like a story,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Is it the same night? By the way you look, I see it is.”

  “I wish I knew what it was all for,” she said.

  “Don’t you know why? You haven’t seen it yet?”

  “Seen what?”

  “Why, Miss Belle and young Master
Fred,” he said with a delighted chuckle.

  “What about them?” she asked.

  But he craned his neck to see his younger self at the door. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he said. “I remember it.”

  “I can’t let you talk to him. That really wouldn’t do.”

  “No. You didn’t let me. You didn’t. I remember.” Dickens smiled wryly. He was ahead of her on this one. “But it meant all the world, to see me like this. I was young then and still so desperate. On the verge of bankruptcy. It was the Carol that saved me.”

  “And it was Belle’s story,” said Mrs Hudson.

  “And yours,” said Dickens.

  He seemed unperturbed, not a bit concerned that he might have stolen the tale that truly cemented his name as Britain’s favourite author. There was no shame in that gaze.

  He was looking over her shoulder now. “Perhaps I could just say one thing to myself...”

  “No you don’t, Charles,” Mrs Hudson said.

  She backed away through the scrum of men who all wanted a piece of the great author.

  “Just one word,” Dickens insisted.

  But he was trapped by his adoring public. Mrs Hudson retreated to the great oak doors, where Charles — a younger Dickens — peered, astonished.

  “I look so old,” he said. “And with such a foolish beard.”

  “It’s your look.”

  “Perhaps I could just talk to him. Briefly.”

  “No,” Mrs Hudson said. “We’re going.”

  “I could just nip back.”

  “No,” Mrs Hudson replied firmly. She held out her hand.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think your older self knows.”

  She took his hand, closed the door and found herself staring into the face of a snowman.

  — 36 —

  SNOW ON THE GROUND. Deep night.

  Mrs Hudson thought for a moment that they must be back in the graveyard. There was the same half moon in the sky but there were no crooked gravestones about.

  They were in a little square of garden edged by a picket fence. A terraced house. Was this? Yes, it was home.

  A snowman in the middle of the lawn, wearing a metal helmet. Standing to attention with a wooden rifle. A row of brass buttons embedded up his torso. A carrot nose.

  Yes, she remembered making this on Christmas Eve. The first Christmas after the war. A whole day making her Victory Snowman. It was Christmas Eve, 1945.

  A light from the window at the back of the house. A side alley leading to the parlour window. A glow of light from inside.

  “Where are we?” Dickens asked.

  “My home. My childhood.” She was about to say after the war, but checked herself. No point getting into that. “A hundred years from your time. One hundred and three years, to be exact.”

  She crept forward, leaving footprints in the snow, wondering if they would be there in the morning and leave a puzzling mystery for a young girl to ponder on Christmas morn, but she remembered no such mystery.

  Along the side of the house, down the narrow yard, she crept to the window, and Charles came behind her.

  The glow of a coal fire from inside, pools of lamplight around the room.

  A girl lying on the rug before the fire. Her parents in adjoining armchairs, holding hands. The parlour at home. She was a girl. The complete leather-bound set of Charles Dickens volumes in the glass cabinet. Her mother reading A Christmas Carol. Their Christmas Eve tradition. The tree all spangling, golden. She thought she could almost smell the sweet scent of pine needles. Magical and warm. Christmas 1945. The war was over and there was hope in the world.

  The girl lying on the rug, listening to the tale of Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, was herself.

  Mrs Hudson fought the urge to knock the window, to greet them. So many times in recent years she’d felt that pang of longing to see her parents again, to spend just one more day with them.

  Charles came beside her.

  “That’s me,” she whispered. “My parents. We’re reading your... a Christmas book you’re going to write.”

  “A Christmas book? How curious.”

  Her father sat in an armchair, his face in shadow. Her mother had her back to the window, silhouetted by the candle that lit up the pages of the book. The girl gazed up at her in rapt attention.

  And then her mother turned a page and handed the book to her husband, passing the candlestick over so that it lit up her father’s face.

  Fred’s face.

  “Oh,” said Dickens. “It’s Fred.”

  The girl got up, kneeling by her mother, who leaned over and kissed her. The mumble of their voices, and the firelight catching the side of her face.

  It was Belle.

  But a different Belle. She had been transformed into a 1940s housewife.

  “But this means that Fred and Belle are—”

  “My parents.”

  But this wasn’t right at all. Her parents had met at a dance in 1934. Mrs Hudson had travelled there herself to ensure it happened, when it was under threat, when she thought someone was targeting her very existence. Her parents, looking so young and awkward at that dance, with a couple of chaperones between them

  That had been their first time, hadn’t it?

  But it hadn’t, she knew now.

  They’d told her that lie. Because they couldn’t tell their daughter that they’d met in 1842 when Charles Dickens was in town and dad had saved mum from a Victorian living hell.

  She’d gone to that night in 1934 and seen an awkward couple and nothing more. Perhaps the chaperones weren’t anything to do with them. Perhaps her mother and father had simply gone to a dance and had their first argument, and that was the awkwardness she’d seen.

  “You didn’t know they’re your parents?”

  “I couldn’t remember their faces.”

  “Fred and Belle are your parents,” Dickens said. “How astounding.”

  Fred took the book and the candle and continued the reading. The girl lay down on the rug again and glanced at the hearth and the stocking hanging there.

  So Fred had taken Belle to 1934, Mrs Hudson thought. And while the 1930s weren’t the best decade to choose, there was a war around the corner and terrible devastation, but here they were in 1945, having come through it, and now there was hope and renewal. There’d be a National Health Service. They would rise with that social care and create a family and their own daughter would go to university to study History. And while that precarious freedom and comfort was always under threat from despots and greedy men who wanted everything for themselves, and it always had to be fought for and defended — it was still there, as a right, and it was infinitely better than that Victorian prison.

  She took in her parents’ faces, as Fred read the story and Belle gazed on him with such a look of love. She’d been so desperate to see her parents again and she’d been with them all day long.

  The girl sat up and leaned against her father’s leg, hugging her knees. Her gaze went to the window.

  Mrs Hudson stepped back, though she felt certain her younger self could see nothing out there.

  She nudged Charles and they retreated to the garden and the snowman standing mute and sad. Snow was falling.

  She took Charles’ hand.

  At the window, her younger self peered out, shielding her eyes, trying to see what was out there.

  Yes, she remembered this. Looking out at the snow falling on a Christmas Eve, wanting to see Father Christmas riding across the night sky on a sleigh, and instead seeing a man in a top hat and an old woman in a cloak and hood.

  Two ghosts and a snowman.

  The house faded, her younger self at the window slipping away, and Mrs Hudson found herself back on New Street in 1842.

  — 37 —

  FRED OPENED HIS EYES. He still had hold of Belle. Her hands locked in his.

  “We’ve come back,�
� she said. “You held onto me.”

  They were before the theatre, under the portico. The placard for the Harlequinade still outside. The theatre was shut up. His feet gave way and he slumped against her. She held him up and pressed him against the door.

  “I don’t think I can hold on here,” he said. “I’m fighting to stay with you, but it’s too strong.”

  “Take me with you,” she said.

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “You took me to your childhood. Take me with you again. Take me to your time. Don’t leave me here.” She clung onto him, grasping his hands in hers, and kissed him.

  “I can’t hold on anymore. I’m slipping. I’m sorry.”

  “Just don’t leave me here. There is nothing for me here.”

  “Where I come from, it’s a cruel place.” Sneering fascists everywhere, he thought, fighting in the streets. The world was falling apart. The centre could not hold. “I can’t take you there. It’s too harsh a place.”

  “Harsher than this?”

  It was better, he had to admit. As bad as 1934 was — and it was truly awful for a great many people — it was not as brutal and cruel as this.

  “I won’t let go,” she said. “I’ll hold onto you.”

  It was no use, he thought. It would take him any moment now. He would fall through decades and disappear from her arms. This was the desperate state of love in the world: a couple huddled in a doorway trying to fight off the world’s cruelty.

  “Forster! What ho!”

  Dickens’ voice.

  Belle held Fred up against the door and leaned back to peer up the street. “It’s Mr Dickens,” she said. “And Mrs Hudson.”

  “Don’t let go of me,” Fred said.

  They came to them, Dickens and Mrs Hudson, and Forster rushed over from the other direction.

  “Hallo. What happened?” Dickens said.

  “You all ran off. I had an amazing adventure.”

  “What’s wrong, Fred?” Mrs Hudson asked.

  Their voices swam in a slurry. Mrs Hudson came to him.