The Ghosts of Christmas Yet To Come

I’ve just finished binge-watching the BBC’s new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Did you see it? Victorian novels, and Dickens in particular, are my thing, so you could be excused for thinking that I’d swoon dead away at the liberties taken with the original text. Where were the cosy scenes of middle-class Victorian life? Whence the beaming Cratchit daughters and their twice-turned dresses? The Ghost of Christmas Past effing and jeffing? Mrs Cratchit as a Sweary Mary? Do me a flavour!

Rather than the traditional elderly man in a nightgown, we have gauntly handsome Guy Pearce brooding in his echoing Georgian townhouse. Bob Cratchit is simmering with barely-suppressed rage in the counting house. Mrs Cratchit has more on her mind than the Christmas goose and the pudding. Marley has a long lead-in, staggering through the snow after the Ghost of Christmas Past and watching his treasured childhood toy being hurled on to a symbolic fire. Hung about with manacles, he finally makes his appearance by his business partner’s meagre fireside. It’s not just Scrooge’s soul which is on the line, but his own, which can only be plucked from the snowy wastes of purgatory by the flint-hearted protagonist.

I didn’t see much TV this Christmas. I meant to, but with seven of us in the house (aged respectively 94, 89, 53x2, 16, 13 and 11) it was hard to find something that we all liked. On Christmas Day, I sat with my parents watching the lovely Gareth Malone as he formed a choir at Watford General Hospital. You know what you’re getting with Gareth. Heart-warming vignettes, cheerful optimism that getting a choir together will lift spirits and build community and a final joyful pay-off as the voices are raised in song. We had all that. But there was something else lurking beneath the surface of cheery Christmas songs and the reassuring voice-over. Something not a million miles away from the Cratchits barely getting by, the workers toiling in a creaking system while their rights are taken away one by one and profit taking precedence over compassion any day.

Gareth has several significant conversations with an anaesthetist in the hospital corridors. She’s struggling to get to rehearsals because there’s so much work to do. People, her patients, her colleagues, her two little boys at home are relying on her. She remembers the little bits of magic that used to twinkle in the hospital at Christmas, but now they’re all gone. Her face, tired, tearful yet determined, could stand for so many, back in 1843 and now.

We’re in the dying embers of 2019, 176 years after A Christmas Carol was written. The emaciated, bent, prematurely aged figures of two children, Ignorance and Want, haunt Scrooge’s footsteps in the original novella. If we carry on putting profit, and money, and progress ahead of compassion and basic human rights, argues Dickens, where will we end up? Quite possibly in a hospital in Watford where staff work themselves to the bone because they care so much about their patients and where there aren’t enough beds or enough funding.

Since I started this blog in October, I’ve been asking myself the question, “What makes me a writer?” Today, with this, for the first time, my query is, “What is writing for?” Often, I think, it’s to shine a light on what is going on. That’s what Dickens did in his revolutionary 19^th century novella, holding a mirror up to his society.

Watching Scrooge race through the snowy streets to save Tiny Tim and release the Cratchits from his icy grasp, my heart lifted. Here at last was the moment I’d been waiting for – repentance, forgiveness, the famous line. But no. It never came. The loose ends weren’t tied up. Scrooge still has a long way to go but he’s made a start. The moment where he stands in his office gazing up at the glassy ceiling where Tiny Tim takes his fateful skate was so clever, so multi-layered, so – well, writerly – that it fired off the neurons in my brain to start writing this.

Is the pen mightier than the sword? Sure is. Can words change a society? I hope so. Will 2020 be a year of changes, of progress, of compassion? We can only pray that it is.

So, to all of you, a Happy New Year, and dare I say it, God bless us, everyone.