This event took place just before Christmas probably around 1947. I was born in Tring, Hertfordshire, in 1943. We lived in Beaconsfield Road which ran perpendicular to Miswall Lane. Miswall Lane was a road that sloped down towards the main road into the town. The fact is that my mum was evacuated to Tring when she found that she was pregnant. My dad was in the Home Guard at that time and I suppose came home fairly often, at least I hope so. As I said it was Christmas time in the village of Tring and it was just after the war had ended. There was rationing of everything. But, as is typical at Christmas during times of hardship, people found ways of celebrating the birth of Christ using what they had or what they could scrounge. Hardship or not there were Christmas trees lit up in every house but mine. I remember that the house next door had a beautiful Christmas tree with lights and decorations. The neighbours would let me come in and look at it. This big beautiful tree sitting in a bucket in the centre of their living room with lights of red, white, and green. Blinking on and off. Very festive. I may even have helped to trim the tree. Still, I eventually had to go back to my house which had no tree, no lights and no festive look about it. It was just a bare, treeless, living room.
I asked my mother why we didn’t have a tree. Her answer, which was reasonable for an older person to accept, was that we had no money to spare and that she needed to spend what little money we had on food and clothing. So there I was gazing out the window at all the houses with trees gaily lit, sitting in living rooms that I imagined to be as warm and welcoming as my neighbor’s.
“Mum, are you sure we can’t have a tree?”, I pleaded. “No, I’m sorry Russell but there simply isn’t the money”. “But mum, everyone else has a tree why can’t we?”. It was years before I learned that that particular approach wasn’t going to work on my mum.
Finally after whining and pleading mum gave in. “Oh all right, it’s Christmas Eve, let’s go into the village and see if the shop has a little tree that nobody wants and see if they’ll sell it to me for a few pennies.”. Mum put me in my stroller and off we went along Beaconsfield Road to the village.
We crossed Miswall Lane and started down the hill towards where the trees were sold. While we were walking down the hill a van passed us going down the hill as well. Its back doors were held together by string and I could see that inside the van was full of Christmas trees. I remember wishing that the string would break. Soon after the van passed by and I had seen the trees the string on the doors broke, the doors flew wide open and the biggest Christmas tree I had ever seen fell out the back, rolled along the road and then stopped. A shopkeeper was watching all this and as soon as he saw my mother put the brakes on my stroller he yelled “Go on missus grab that tree.”. Mum ran into the road grabbed the tree and dragged it back to the pavement. I got out of the stroller and we put the tree in and pulled and pushed it all the way home.
I was so excited as mum found a bucket, put some earth in and stood the tree in it. The tree was so big that it not only touched the ceiling of the living room but it curled round. I didn’t care, it was a tree and it was mine and I was going to decorate it. We didn’t have much, as I’ve already said, but mum made decorations using newspaper for tinsel and cotton wool for snow. It was my tree and it was beautiful.
I suppose this could be called a Christmas miracle but we were Jewish and we didn’t celebrate Christmas.
