‘Just listen to you, Holly Johnson. You’re off your head, that’s what’s wrong with you. Because there isn’t any Santa. It’s just your mam and dad doing it to try and get you to be good over Christmas. You should see what my parents do every year to keep us believing. Sure last Christmas, my dad …’.
‘Shhh!’ I remember Sandy Curran, who we all used to nickname Sandy Currant Bun, hissing. Then an embarrassed silence while the penny dropped; that the words ‘dad’ or ‘parents’ were something not to be mentioned in front of me, as they all instantly remembered my own particular family situation. In fact, barring Jayne Byrne – a quiet-spoken girl in my class whose father had died the previous year – I was the only other girl who came from a single-parent family.
‘Sorry Holly,’ one girl grumbled reluctantly.
‘Yeah, me and all. I forgot.’
‘I didn’t mean to …’
‘It’s OK,’ I shrugged, realizing in the way that little girls of seven can, that my little family had been earmarked as different right from the get-go. Realizing it, though not having the first clue why.
‘Ho, ho, HO!!!’ was all I could hear from the roof of our little bungalow, in a woman’s impression of what a deep man’s baritone should be. Which was followed by footsteps, but God bless Mum, because she was so svelte and petite, by absolutely no stretch of the imagination could anyone – even a seven-year-old – possibly confuse those footsteps, with a rotund, fifteen-stone Santa Claus.
The trouble she went to just to keep Christmas magical for me, her only child. And I loved her for it, even though I hadn’t the heart to tell her all the disturbing rumours that had been circulating the playground ever since Halloween. Or about Beth, another girl in my class who was openly laughed at and ridiculed for ‘still believing’.
Then there were the snow prints on the living room carpet, leading a trail all the way from the chimney over to our Christmas tree and back again. To this day, I still don’t know how Mum even managed it. Papier mâché? Cotton wool? Back then, I was too young and thick to dig a bit deeper. And yet every Christmas morning without fail, there they’d be: real, live snow prints dotted all over our living room carpet.
Money was tight for Mum and yet still Santa never failed to deliver in style. A doll’s house that particular year, I remember. A little girl’s fantasy version of just what a proper Victorian doll’s house should be, right down to window boxes and plastic figurines in bonnets and corsets that you could move around inside.
‘You see?’ she said, beaming that wise, calm smile that’s imprinted on my mind to this very day. ‘Santa never forgets good children.’
It’s only looking back now that I realize how tough Mum must have had it really. She’d adopted me at forty-two, quite lateish in her life, certainly for the nineteen eighties, a time when women in their forties rarely had kids and certainly didn’t go adopting on their own. It was an extraordinarily brave thing to take on, then as now, and until I arrived I think she never really thought it would actually happen. I was, as she used to joke, ‘her little surprise’.
Right from when I started preschool, she was by far the oldest of all the mums waiting for us at the school gates. Not only that, but she was one of the few who worked full-time too; all the others seemed to have husbands who were the main breadwinners. Back then, right bang in the middle of The Decade that Taste Forgot, I can still see all the younger mothers, in shoulder pads with big hair and waaaay too much blusher, nattering excitedly about Talking Heads / Duran Duran / who was going to see Fatal Attraction that weekend.
And right there at the back, always at the back, Mum would be waiting quietly for me. More often than not, still in her nurse’s uniform of long blue trousers with a white top over them, navy woolly cardigan, flat, sensible shoes with her hair pulled back into a tiny bun. Neat as a pin, like always.
‘Is that your mammy or your granny?’ I remember one girl in my class innocently asking me. I never said a word to Mum about it, but I think she knew anyway. She knew by the way I hugged her tight that night and said, ‘I think you’re lovely … and not that old at all!’ She just knew, same way she always knew everything, mind reader that she was.
The subject of my birth parents was one she and I never went into, at least not until I was old enough to properly understand. Even though as a nosey kid I practically had the poor woman persecuted.
‘Molly in my class says you have to have a mother and a father to get born,’ I used to plague her, day and night, like a dog with a bone.
‘And Molly’s quite right,’ Mum would reply, briskly getting dinner ready, efficiently cleaning up any mess behind her as she went. Swear to God, our kitchen was cleaner than any hospital she’d ever worked in. You could have performed surgery right on our kitchen table, it was that sterile.
‘But then what happened to my real parents? Did they die? Like Jayne in school’s Dad did?’
‘Holly,’ she’d say calmly, barely looking up from the housework as if to reduce the enormity of where this conversation was headed. ‘How many times do I have to tell you that family is family and that all families are different? Sometimes you have a mum and a dad who aren’t able to bring up a child by themselves and sometimes you have someone like me, who’s on her own, but who wanted nothing more than a little girl exactly like you.
‘I wanted a child like you so badly, then you came along and you were like a miracle for me. It was December when you first arrived and suddenly there you were. My own personal little Christmas miracle.’
‘But Mum …’
‘… What’s really important,’ she’d add, stopping to affectionately ruffle the top of my head, ‘is that in our little family, no child could possibly be more loved than you.’
‘But where did my real mum and dad go?’ I persisted, with all the stubbornness of childhood.
‘Sweetheart, they didn’t go anywhere, and if you ever wanted to meet them, then when the time is right I’m sure we can. But here in our little family, there’s just the two of us: you and me. And if you ask me, we’re the best, happiest family you could ever ask for.’
Didn’t stop me from being utterly consumed with thoughts of my birth parents though, particularly when I was old enough to fully understand, and Mum told me everything. All about my birth parents, how ridiculously young they were when I was born, my biological mother nineteen and still in college, while my father was younger still, just eighteen and barely out of school. She told me how they’d no choice but to put me up for adoption.
But then before what happened I’d happily have battered down the Adoption Authority’s offices to track down my birth parents, wherever they were now, wherever life had taken them.
Whereas after, I gave up even caring. The only family I’d ever had was gone, so what was the point, I figured. After all, I’d been lucky enough to have the best parent anyone could possibly have asked for.
