Festive Nostalgia, Gobbolino and the Magic Hamsters: It's Christmas Storyteller!

Hello! After two weeks of sore eyes, complaining and low attention spans, I am on the up. I confidently predict that tonight I will be out of the cold and into the eggnog. I’m so keen to step into the Christmas feeling, which is still eluding me. Some nice things coming up on the blog this week, including the Pile of Leaves Christmas Party (!) and a Christmassy story by my friend, Sarah Hadley. They ought to help me – you’re not having any difficulty with the season, are you...?

I’m reading The Winter of the Birds by Helen Cresswell, but also Mysterious Christmas Stories, satisfying a sharpened midwinter appetite for the macabre. And I found two fab anthologies at my local library (in the children’s section, with my sister: ‘Do you come in here a lot?’ she asked me, visibly perturbed – ‘Don’t you feel a bit... big?’), one by Michael Foreman with things like Kenneth Grahame and Hans Christian Andersen, one from the OUP with a real mix of things, from Sue Townsend to John Gordon.

Just last week I lifted down the Christmas Box from the attic, December reads mixed up with icicle lights, home-made decorations and wooden snowmen: The Box of Delights, Gawain and the Green Knight, A Child’s Christmas in Wales – and my Christmas Storytellers. Special issues of a part-work from the 1980s whose ambition I still admire: fortnightly miscellanies of folktales and fairytales, serialised novels like Heidi and Pinocchio, and original material.

These two are objects of deep nostalgia for me, enchanted tomes (about the weight of a Radio Times) and like other things of that kind, I can’t help wondering whether it gave me ideas. My Mum’s Mum, Joyce, must have bought them for me when I was two, tiny, book-loving and impressionable. They came (stand by as Nick reveals his age) with cassettes, since lost, and I can just about remember lying on the carpet, listening, looking at pictures, vanishing into that world. I wonder sometimes if that’s a lost ideal of reading experience, of Christmas too: lying alone, enspelled by disembodied voices.

They would have been years worth remembering anyway – year by year that followed there were fewer Campbell’s and Brazier’s about. Now it’s just us four, same house, same table. Such a mysterious way of marking time, of registering change – to go back to something beyond memory, or back to no particular memory, shared between a group.

One of the most memorable stories for me – and other fans of the series, it turns out – is a special Christmas adventure for Gobbolino, born a witch’s cat, determined to be a kitchen cat. In the arms of the farm children with whom he has made he his new, non-occult life, our tiny fluffy hero goes carol singing through the snow. But what are those eyes – not human eyes – flickering in the darkness – and that ungodly caterwaul of accusation:

‘Gobbolino is a witch’s cat! Gobbolino is a witch’s cat!’

All turns out for the best, you’ll be pleased to hear, though Sheila Hancock really goes for it, and the music is rather dramatic. I realised just today that this is (dramatic chord) a special commission from Ursula Moray Williams. It’s not trumpeted as such by Storyteller: well, who would care? The magazine doesn’t even credit the writers of new material, its only real failing (apparently Geraldine McCaughrean was among them). But it warms me to think that in ‘83 Moray Williams had a new audience for a book she wrote in the sixties, that she knew about it and contributed to it.

She’s an interesting one, Moray Williams: prolific writer, lived in a castle, was a magistrate, worked with Jackanory and the Puffin Book Club. One to keep an eye on.

Right, I’m off for another cup of hot, sweet tea...