Steptoe, Slade, & Santa
A 1970s English Christmas  

2,607 words

The first thing we heard was the bells, the familiar ching ching ching coming through the frosty air from a distance. My mother would turn out the living-room lights and we would all crowd to the window to watch the arrival of the great man himself, my little (and identical twin) brothers standing on chairs or each other to get a good view. Then the amplified Christmas carols could be heard: Once in Royal David’s City, Silent Night, We Three Kings.

Strange that I can remember all the words to those carols all these years, these decades, later, including the specially modified lyrics to the last one, known by all English schoolboys at the time, and occasionally surreptitiously sung at school assembly:

We three kings of Orient are,
One in a taxi, one in a car.
One on a scooter, beeping his hooter,
Following Ringo Starr.

Actually, we did sing it straight when there was a school carol concert for parents. When I was a very small soprano – of the chorister rather than the gangster variety – my solo was the saddest verse in the carol, the Oriental king who brought the embalming agent myrrh to the stable:

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom.
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

It’s like something out of H. P. Lovecraft. I’m surprised I didn’t grow up warped.

Back in the house, finally, the “sleigh” (actually a modified Rotary Club van) would turn the corner into our road, Santa himself sitting in the center, surrounded by presents (or rather empty and gift-wrapped hat-boxes), his bass voice booming through the microphone: “Merry Christmas, ho ho ho!” Santa is part of an endangered species now, and “Ho” has taken on a different meaning, but this was the early 1970s, a wonderful decade in which to come of age, but a world lost to English children today as various forces strive to erase Christmas from the calendar. Here is a thoroughly depressing report on London’s biggest Christmas market, although the reporter can’t see the word “Christmas” anywhere, and stall-holders have been told not to use the word to customers.

Although I was born I north London, and we lived in Highgate, that part of London was rapidly becoming gentrified, and proved too expensive for my father’s civil-service income when it came to house-buying. So it was that I grew up in the London suburbs, a world of hedgerows and neat front gardens, where you knew the local policeman and the shops all closed on Sundays.  My primary school, for ages 4 to 11, was a small C of E (Church of England) school of about 80 children, all of whom were white and either middle-class proper, or lower middle-class (that is, the middle class without money) like me. I wasn’t Tiny Tim from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, we just weren’t very well off, which is actually an excellent upbringing in a mercantile, Mammon-led world.

Religion was a part of school life even when it wasn’t Christmas, but we weren’t force-fed the Bible or its teachings. We said prayers at assembly, and always the Lord’s Prayer, which I suspect I am not alone in remembering today, along with the times-tables and the carols noted. At Christmas we had a special assembly and all the children got presents, usually one of the wonderful Ladybird Books that gave an early idea of the world and its wonders to those of my generation in England. Looking back at classic covers is very moving, with titles such as Things to Make, The Nurse, and Things to Look for in Autumn. The famous Janet and John books taught me to read, which I did from a very early age. I was pleased to see that Ladybird Publishing still exists, although I approached its website with trepidation, expecting to find a depressing bestiary of transgenderism and cross-dressing, with titles such as Janet and Jane or Why White People Are Especially Horrid, but they seem to have kept to their remit of teaching small children to read.

On the last day of school before the Christmas holiday, we didn’t have any lessons, but little classroom parties where the school record-player was given over to our 45s, if they weren’t too raucous. The cake and lemonade flowed plentifully, and we went home at lunchtime, walking if it was snowing because the little number 440 bus couldn’t negotiate one of the hills if it had snowed and the council hadn’t got round to gritting the roads yet.

Christmas Day itself was a simple affair. I had the box-room after my brothers arrived and required the larger of the two bedrooms that weren’t  my parents’. It measured seven feet square, another important part of my life as I now dislike large living spaces, and am writing this in a single room measuring 12 by 10 feet. Once the twins were old enough to understand the concept of Christmas, a camp bed was set up in their room, with its bunk-beds, so that I could somehow persuade them to go to sleep. We would whisper jokes in the darkness, and they would let me in on some of their special “twin language”, which many such identical siblings invent to keep their world safe from the prying ears of grown-ups. Later, the boys would take part in twin studies programs at a London university. When I met two non-identical twins at secondary school, it took me a while to grasp the concept.

As noted, there wasn’t much money around chez Gullick – which my father would later christen the house he retired to in Vaucluse in the south of France – so no bikes or expensive cricket bats for Christmas. The only two gifts I can remember with any certainty is my mother giving me the Elton John album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (still great today), and my half-sister giving me a paperback copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Oh, and I had Action Man, a tough-guy boy-doll with various military outfits. I imagine he has had a dishonorable discharge in today’s world of faux-pacifism. But I do recall a very fetching Finnish ski-patrol outfit arriving in my Christmas pillow-case (does anyone seriously use stockings? Perhaps Santa has a slight kink). You have to hand it to the Finns, the first nation to be able to ski at vast speeds while simultaneously firing sub-machine guns and being drunk.

We had a tree, and I do remember my father staggering one year while decorating it, and lying on the floor.  My brothers thought this a hilarious game, but he had actually had a heart attack. This turned out to be to his advantage as he gave up his 40-a-day cigarette habit. Then the 70s progressed, and I passed the old 11-plus exam and attended a grammar school rather than the rowdy local comprehensive school my brothers went to, and whose only pupil of note was, appropriately enough, Barnes Wallis, the inventor of the “bouncing bomb” which decimated many German dams during World War 2.

The 1970s, for me, was the formative decade of music, and in 1975 I saw my first real band. A friend called me on the old Bakelite telephone and asked if I wanted a ticket to a gig at Earls Court. It cost £2.50 – which I had earned the previous Sunday on my paper-round – and the band was Led Zeppelin. I couldn’t hear properly for two days afterwards. But music was a big part of Christmas, aside from the carol-singing. Here are my top five 1970s UK Christmas singles:

5. In Dulci Jubilo, Mike Oldfield.

Oldfield was already famous for his instrumental album Tubular Bells, which was funded by the founder of Virgin Records, Sir Richard Branson, re-mortgaging his house. This is a re-working of an old German folk song, and is all flutes, tin whistles, and martial snare drum until what can only be described as a mental guitar solo overtakes Yuletide proceedings.

4. Step into Christmas, Elton John.

Sir Elton with an upbeat Christmas cracker. Watch for the subliminal images of Reginald Dwight (John’s real name) using drumsticks as vampire teeth, and step into Christmas. As Elton’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin, notes in the song, the admission’s free.

3. I Believe in Father Christmas, Greg Lake.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer, along with Yes, gave 70s prog rock a bad name, in my view, but this solo effort goes a small way towards making up for their endless noodling. The video was inexplicably shot in the desert, but contains lyrics which border on the poetic:

They said there’d be snow at Christmas,
They said there’d be peace on earth.
But instead it just kept on raining,
A veil of tears for the Virgin birth.

Fortunately for English prog rock, Jethro Tull were around to save the decade, and I would have included Tull’s Ring Out, Solstice Bells, but it is one of their worst songs and they put it out it grudgingly to fulfil a contractual obligation. But singer and flautist Ian Anderson joins Lake here in a church for a very resonant version of Lake’s single.

2. I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day, Wizzard.

Now we’re talking. 1973 was peak glam-rock in the UK, and this was famously kept off the coveted Number 1 Christmas slot by my own Number 1 below. A word of warning. This whole video is like a really bad acid trip that happened to coincide with Xmas, but not only is the song a rocker, the bass player looks like Lemmy, except that he has clearly never played a bass in is life. If only Motörhead had done a Xmas single. Oh wait. What’s this? Run, Rudolph, Run, really was just that, although Lemmy was probably referring to Rudolf Hess rather than Santa’s little helper. Actually, since it is Christmas, here is an extra something under the tree. When Lemmy died – and I saw one of his last gigs – he was credited with owning one of the world’s largest collections of Nazi memorabilia. His reasoning for amassing this is sound, I feel:

I only collect the stuff, I didn’t collect the ideas. I’ve always liked a good uniform. Throughout history, it’s always been the bad guy who dressed the best. Napoleon, the Confederates, the Nazis. If England had a good uniform, I’d collect ours as well. But what does the British have? Khaki.

RIP, Lemmy, wherever you are.

1. Merry Christmas Everybody,

Predictable, I know, but it is something of a national institution in England. It’s a strange song. Its shuffling, 2/4 beat is a sort of show-band skiffle with strummed chords over the top. But Slade were a band with a very English sense of humor, and the lyrics are an appealing mix of irreverence and the low-level Bacchanal that is – or was – an English Christmas:

Did your granny always tell ya
That the old songs are the best?
Then she’s up and rock and rolling with the rest.

Just as Christmas never really started until Rotary Club Santa pulled into town, so too it has never got properly underway for the rest of my life until I hear Noddy Holder’s lung-busting Yuletide clarion call; “It’s Chriiistmaaaaaaaaaaaaaas!!!!”  And there is even a rather philosophical note to sign off this Chrimbo classic:

Look to the future now.
It’s only just begun.

When Top of the Pops was finished, there was a lot more Christmas telly to look forward to. The “Christmas Specials” were always a staple of 1970s English culture. The Two Ronnies, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, the wonderful Morecambe and Wise, Dick Emery, Benny Hill; This was a golden age of English television comedy. Always my favorite was Steptoe and Son (the 1973 Christmas Special is here), set in the junkyard of two English “rag and bone men”, a sort of ribald, comedic Beckett play. One used to come down our street, the same one Rotary Club Santa used. You took out your junk and gave his horse a bit of apple or a lump of sugar. Now England has become a sort of moral and cultural yard sale, with everything going to the highest low bid, it’s hard not to draw a comparison. Christmas was magical when I was a boy, and I suppose I should send a thankyou note for the gift of the internet, to enjoy it one more time. I just don’t know who to send it to.

Merry Christmas, everybody.