Reflections: A Roadkill Christmas

One of the vividest memories I have of my grandmother dates from December, 1979. I was nine years old and my homesick parents had taken our family back to the U.K. for Christmas for the first time since we had emigrated to Australia in 1975. 1979 brought a cold winter to southeastern England, and an unusually snowy one on the rural, windswept part of the Suffolk coast where my grandparents lived. When we arrived the roads snaking across the Suffolk fens were lined with high snowbanks that made driving the narrow laneways even more fraught than usual. In 1979 my grandmother’s daily driver was a 1965 Mini Clubman with a four-speed manual gearbox, no heat, and wheels the size of grapefruit. There was nothing about this vehicle that recommended it for winter driving. Nor was Gran a particularly good driver, but as with most activities in her life, this fact didn’t prevent her from throwing herself into the activity with gusto. So, when she set out on a snowy morning early during our visit to shop for Christmas dinner ingredients, her oldest grandson, sensing adventure, was keen to ride along. As we sat in the freezing car preparing to set off, Gran explained her theory of driving on snow and ice, which was that one should get the car into top gear as soon as possible. This she commenced to do with a great grinding of gears, and we fishtailed out of the driveway and into the street, picking up speed in the direction of Aldeburgh. So, we were skimming along between snow-blanketed fields at a pretty good clip when two fat pheasants chose the exact wrong moment to fly out from a hedgerow, and encountered the Mini with a flak-burst of feathers and a soft, double “whump.” Rather than taking evasive action, Gran let out a shout of triumph and stood on the brakes, sending the Mini into a series of graceful pirouettes. When it came to rest against a snowbank she scrambled out and dashed back up the road to retrieve the pheasants, which she deposited into the back seat beside nine-year-old me. The image of those two large, beautifully colored, exotic-looking birds lolling deadly on the brown vinyl has never left me. Simultaneously, the Christmas dinner menu, and my impression of my grandmother, both underwent some modification as a result of this event.

[Read another of James Fox-Smith's "Reflections," about the experience of internet withdrawals, here.]

Gran was the last member of my family to have experienced anything approaching scarcity. While she and my grandfather were reasonably well-to-do by the time I entered the picture, the straitened circumstances of her upbringing as a coal-miner’s daughter in nineteen-twenties Wales had inculcated her with a reflexive thriftiness that no amount of money would ever assuage. She had a particular horror about wasting food, that manifested itself in the myriad ways she had perfected for turning the leftovers of one meal into the raw material of the next, and in the delight she took in any activity that resulted in a free meal. This meant that during my childhood visits, no afternoon walk (she was a great one for walking) was embarked upon without a bag for gathering whatever edible foodstuffs the Suffolk fields and the season had to offer: field mushrooms in spring, blackberries and gooseberries in early summer; apples and sloe berries—which she would pick from hedgerows then steep in gin to make a luscious sloe gin liqueur—in autumn. Any grandchild who managed to catch an edible fish from the lake at the bottom of the garden could expect showers of praise, and while she was no hunter, in winter she was happy to let hunters use the lakeside dock, so long as there was a goose or a couple of ducks in it for her. 

The image of those two large, beautifully colored, exotic-looking birds lolling deadly on the brown vinyl has never left me. Simultaneously, the Christmas dinner menu, and my impression of my grandmother, both underwent some modification as a result of this event.

It’s interesting to reflect on how my grandmother’s early experiences (and presumably those of her forebears) still echo, leaving their mark on ensuing generations who have never known the kind of scarcity that makes someone incapable of leaving a pair of stunned pheasants lying in a roadside ditch. Her daughter—my mother—inherited Gran’s inability to waste food. In her own kitchen Mum makes performance art out of decanting leftovers into a Russian nesting-doll-like series of progressively smaller containers until, finally, every morsel is consumed. Then there’s her grandson—yours truly—who, having yet again planted ten times the number of tomato, cucumber, pepper, and squash plants required to feed one small family, now lies awake at 3 am worrying about how to consume all the fresh produce piled soggily on his kitchen countertops. The ways in which the experiences of long-departed ancestors influence the habits and attitudes we embody today are a reminder that, whether in the kitchen, in the garden, on the road, or in life, no-one ever really walks alone.