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Self-Sufficiency in Style 

Christmas Poultry

A memoir of 

  Christmas's long ago

 The English Christmas, once banned completely during Cromwell's time, reinvented itself when Queen Victoria's husband imported the Christmas tree from Germany.

Charles Dickens froze the instant traditions into a timeless winter Victorian London.

The only native English traditions remaining seem to be the Yule log and the raffish mistletoe.

Christmas became the central family festival throughout the south of England, leaving the north and Scotland to their New Year and Hogmanay.

These new English Christmas traditions spread wherever the English speakers travelled

... a tasteful recreation of 1800's London in a Boston departmental store, cards depicting snow covered village roofs on a sunlit Australian mantelpiece, cold turkey on a New Zealand beach.

Dickens and the accompanying poultry played a big part in my childhood - all our childhoods.

Although not born a local lad, part of his education was there, and he set up home at Gad's Hill creating his books, stories and, inadvertently, Christmas customs.

Even David Copperfield and Peggotty's upturned boat house owed its origins to a local example on the banks of the Thames. My father could remember it well from his childhood.

Peggotty's strange home

Many of the buildings in his books were inspired by local examples. Dickens' stories, sometimes set by the mysterious fog smoked marshes, drew their inspiration from Kent.

The church tower, where as a part time soldier armed with broomstick, my father watched for the expected German invasion in 1940 can still be seen as background to a frightened child , in a black and white grained movie endlessly repeated on many millions of TV's every year all over the world.

The film was "Great Expectations", the boy Pip.

Dickens' monochrome world is read everywhere from Russia to America and taken as Victorian reality.

Dickens was a master story teller and perhaps the originator of the tradition of a Christmas story: slightly frightening, socially disturbing, but coming out right in the end.

He added words to our language. Who can fail to understand "Scrooge!" -  an unmistakable character trait originating in the unlikely tight-fist unwillingly carrying a message and emphasising the importance of poultry to an English Christmas dinner?

Charles Dickens - chronicler of Victorian Christmas.

Food rationing was tighter after the war than it had been during it.

Late 1940s England was dark, cold, hungry, mutinous and disillusioned. They had cheerfully removed Churchill from power and set about changing their whole society, but it was not working.

Several successive Christmases were pretty bleak for many families. There was no bird, and rabbit in front of a coal-less fire did not inspire.

Never too keen to deal with the minutia of bureaucratic rule, she felt that no Christmas bird, after loyally spending years under a hail of enemy bombs when she could have been safely ensconced at the family farm in Ireland, was too much to expect.

Her native disobedience reasserted itself, but with style.

She had long flaunted Irish law by smuggling contraband into the Free State from England.

Ireland banned the British newspaper the "News of the World"  south of the border. The endless diet of sex, crime and Sassenach sport, too strong a stuff for the emerging republic.

An explosive combination.

Sex and scandal to titillate rural Ireland.

Each Sunday my father was despatched to buy the "News of the World" since no lady would ever think of being seen buying such a scurrilous paper. The offending paper was carefully wrapped within a respectable newspaper, the "Kent Messenger" for choice.

A few illicit letters were added for sisters and mother to take advantage of the special newspaper postage price and adding a breech of British rules to the outrage of smuggling the "News of the World" into Ireland.

My mother was always strictly neutral on such matters. Whatever the current state of affairs between England and Ireland, she impartially ignored the minor rules and regulations of both with a lofty indifference, even contempt.

One can imagine the scene in western Ireland. The "Kent Messenger" with its cricket scores and wedding reports discarded and reduced to lighting the turf fire.

The illicit newspaper seemingly confirming the very worst of Irish opinion of the morals of their neighbours across the Irish Sea and, very properly, appreciated accordingly.

 The letters would be distributed amongst the four sisters, who probably enjoyed getting news of their sister's escapades at a special discount from the GPO.

It seems that for some, now inexplicable, reason the import of chickens from Southern Ireland was banned immediately after the war.

Turkeys were allowed, possibly because there were not many in Ireland available to be shipped to England.

Although her home farm had no turkeys but plenty of chickens, mother was more than equal to this apparent anomaly and ready to take advantage of the situation.

You mean I'm allowed in?

  Where the turkey feathers originally actually came from is a mystery. She probably enlisted the local butcher's assistance with encouraging references to his misdemeanours during war-time rationing.

One Sunday, well before Christmas,  a small bundle was added to the contraband newspaper and despatched as usual.

On receipt, they were probably stored in the spare missal whilst awaiting the call to duty.

An Irish turkey.

The customs declaration attached to the outside was quite specific and dogmatic: "ONE SMALL TURKEY."

There inside was said turkey and the bundle of feathers, by way of proof.

This is how, in our family, a chicken was always known as an "Irish turkey."

The arrival of the Irish turkey becoming quite an event and a tradition in its own right.

It did not always go without a hitch. One year, the postman arrived holding his nose. Naturally, he took the full blame for delivering this famous bird in less than perfect condition.

"No wonder those awful people blew up the Dublin GPO, you are all totally useless!"

Quick! take it to your mother before it walks there.

My father had that air of vindication. "She has done it this time!"

She hadn't. The Irish turkey was quite the best we had ever tasted.

Eventually the "Irish turkey" was to fall victim to the end of rationing and the return of prosperity.

My mother had little option but to return to legality, at least, until she found another source of forbidden poultry.

But that is a story for another  Christmas.

Happy Christmas

- from Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner.