The wonderful ghosts of Christmas past

The past shifts about like clouds, now dense, now parting for a memory to shine out, perhaps randomly, but bright as the sun.

Here is the Sheffield Christmas when I was four and slept in Great-Aunt Florence’s room, on an eiderdown beside her bed, in the terraced house that smelled of coal smoke — the Christmas of worrying about how dirty Santa must get, going up and down the sooty chimneys.

Home was Scarborough: the bracing sea air and howling gales where I missed the coal dust smell, though it brought back the cough I had had since nearly dying of whooping cough, aged two — the cough that has never really left me, so that many a Christmas since has smelled of Vicks, camphor, Friars’ Balsam.

The Sheffield Christmas was the spooky one, too, half-frightening, half-fascinating, when I hid under the table, with its long cloth, as my grandmother and great-aunts held a seance above my head.