It’s the journey, not the destination – the highs and lows of realising my dream of writing a novel (part five)

There was a lot to be excited about that first Christmas we spent in England. Christmas in New Zealand means beaches and sunshine, the beginning of summer with long, warm evenings and barbeques with friends. It had taken me a long time to get used to all that, being the opposite of everything I had experienced growing up in Warwickshire, and I had never quite gotten over the feeling that it was all wrong. I wanted snow and a fireplace, a tree with lights and tinsel and chocolate money for Mac (our baby boy) which I would eat as he was too young. I also wanted turkey with all the trimmings, which admittedly we had in New Zealand too, but it’s not the same when the temperature is in the mid-twenties and the gravy smells a bit like sun-lotion. I couldn’t wait. Christmas carol singers at the front door, Christmas specials on the telly. It used to be Morcambe and Wise and Bruce Forsythe when I was growing up, but Eastenders would do. Actually we had started watching Eastenders when we arrived and had become huge fans. Best of all though, we had friends arriving. A couple we knew from Auckland phoned and asked if we wanted visitors. They were working in a pub in London and I think they wanted to see familiar faces as much as we did.

It all went quite well. It even snowed a bit. Jenny and Mike arrived driving a Volkswagen van. They had been traveling in Europe, as Kiwis and Australians do, although I was a bit baffled that our friends had chosen to make their trip in the winter. Perhaps they forgot about the opposite seasons in the northern hemisphere. They complained that it had been cold on the beaches in Greece, so they’d cut their trip short and returned to London. Anyway, it was good to see them. We took them to the local pub and with the four of us and the baby too, we outnumbered the locals. The locals were used to seeing me there, sitting quietly with my pint most evenings. Of course they didn’t know I was secretly observing them and that they had all become characters in my horror novel. I hadn’t planned on writing horror, because I didn’t really have a plan at all, but I was enjoying myself. It was about a young couple who move in to an isolated village and find themselves trapped in a nightmare. In reality the village wasn’t like that. I was just expressing the sense Dale and I had of being a long way from everything we knew, and the looming terror that lurked in the pages of my book was our own very uncertain future which was an ever-present shadow we tried hard to ignore. What if this didn’t work out? What if my novel wasn’t published? A lot of what-ifs.

Jenny and Mike stayed for two days. We drank and ate and opened small presents that we had bought for each other and put under the tree, which was a real one that smelt of pine instead of plastic. For Dale and I, this was a special year. Of course there was the disastrous business collapse that resulted in the loss of almost everything we had and precipitated our move to England, but that’s not what I mean. Dale had given birth to our first child and we had gotten married, unfortunately (in the eyes of Dale’s parents) in that order. The marriage ceremony took place at the registry office a few weeks before we left Auckland, and was followed by a glass of champagne on the beach with our friends. No special dress for Dale, no bridesmaids or reception attended by friends and family, just us and then home to carry on packing.

So this was the very first Christmas we were spending as a family, a real one complete with small child. We bought him a present even though he was oblivious to the occasion. It was one of those things you put babies in that allows them to be upright without falling over, in this case a sort of bouncy seat set in the middle of a circular contraption on wheels made of plastic. There were various activities arranged on a circular shelf around him. Mainly things he could hit that made a noise, which delighted him. While we sat around the fire, drinks in hand, lights on the tree and snow falling outside the cottage, Mac bounced up and down like a maniac, the happiest child in the world, occasionally regurgitating bits of mashed food and drool. Our baby. My son. I was thirty-seven years old, my career a tangled wreckage behind me, the future ever-so-slightly scary if I thought about it, which I resolutely didn’t. Gone was the company car, the expense account, the monthly salary, the quaint villa we’d bought near the beach. We were happy though. In fact I had never been so happy, which made me think about what was truly important in life. I don’t know what conclusion I came to though. Full of cheap wine and Dale’s home-made, only slightly burnt mince pies, I fell asleep half-through the Eastenders Christmas special and dreamed of my novel stacked high in shop windows by that time next year  .