Synopsis: Two classic Christmas stories by award-winning author, Robert Westall. In The Christmas Cat a girl’s miserable holiday at her uncle’s vicarage is saved by the appearance of an unruly neighbour and an abandoned, pregnant cat. In The Christmas Ghost a boy has a hair-raising Christmas Eve encounter with a ghost at the factory where his father works – a ghost who must convey a desperate message. It is only by convincing the adults around them to believe – in them or other people – that the two young protagonists can save the spirit of Christmas.

Review: The rather romantic, snow-strewn cover of Christmas Spirit belies its rather more unsettling contents. This is no fuzzy collection of fireside Christmas tales from simpler times, but rather two stories which challenge and provoke, as well as entertain. Drawing on his own childhood experiences, Westall evokes the harsh realities of life in a northern industrial town during the inter-war Depression. Here, life is hard, unemployment is rife, families struggle to make ends meet. However, good humour, determination and loving care shine through, from young Bobbie and his kind-hearted Nana in the first story, to the narrator’s father in the second. People are generous and loyal to their own, yet suspicious of outsiders (as shown by the initial xenophobia towards ‘Otto the Jew’ in The Christmas Ghost). Divisions between rich and poor are stark, as the high wall in The Christmas Cat symbolises, a barrier which Bobbie and the narrator must climb for their two worlds to meet. Some of Westall’s most biting irony is saved for Christianity, the alienated vicar singing evensong alone in an empty church, the ‘Sally Army’ “giv[ing] up promising Hell to drunkards for one night in the year” to play carols (p. 128). God is portrayed as very distant from the life, death, poverty and pain of ordinary people, if not morally culpable in permitting war or “letting some poor beggar at Otto’s get himself fried to death by molten soda ash” (p. 127).

However, despite this anti-religious tone, both these stories are in different ways tales of redemption. In The Christmas Cat, the vicar must be rescued from the cold-hearted control of the vicious Mrs Brindley and reconnected Scrooge-like with the needs of his community. In The Christmas Ghost, the ghostly appearance is an attempt to atone for failings in the past, to save the lives of the chemical factory workers from an unsuspected peril. In both cases, these acts of ‘salvation’ are abetted by plucky, resourceful (and sometimes irreverent) young protagonists, motivated by love to take risks and challenge adult prejudice or scepticism.

 Extensively illustrated throughout by John Lawrence’s evocative line drawings, these are Christmas parables with a dark edge, stories with much to engage older readers in KS2 and much potential for challenging discussion.

2007-11-18