Christmas, 1955

A beautiful festive short story from Stuart Evers set on Christmas Eve, in 1955, June luxuriates in a Christmas Eve ritual of a sacrosant bath habit she picked up from the lady of the house where she was once in service. A bath in which she will tolerate no interruptions, not even from her husband, Peter. In this bath, she communes with the dead, including her son, Thomas and her daughter-in-law, Pearl, it is at once a communion, a tradition and a reckoning. June does get interrupted by a surprise visit from Nudge, a younger brother she has ostracised and not seen since he shamed the family, and went to prison. She wants rid of him before Peter or her grandson, Drummond, see him, a woman willing to spend time with the dead, but unforgiving of, and not with the living. Many thanks to Zuckerman for an ARC.

I first became aware of Evers as someone I'd bump into at parties, back when those were a thing, but over the years he's quietly become a pretty well-respected author, albeit one with whom I've not kept up very well. Indeed, this short story is a festive sidebar to his most recent novel, which I've not read, but by which I'm definitely now tempted. So I have no idea of the wider context for this story of a family which has made fragile and partial social advances from a background in service, but I liked the little details. Specifically, the little physical details through which a very precise sensory world is evoked, but also the metaphysical ones. What a lovely, if still poignant, idea to flip the protagonist being visited by spirits on Christmas Eve from a dread visitation into a familiar ritual of the season, the half-comforting, half-sad thoughts of the past with which all participating adults are wreathed at this time of year made manifest.

(Netgalley ARC)

A perfectly pitched evocative short story about Christmas memories, and remembering who has been important to you over your life time, visited by ghosts of Christmas past, and looking back at family memories.

I could imagine it being read on Radio 4 over Christmas - beautifully gentle