Written in response to a prompt from my fellow writer, Michelle Scorziello. Find her on Medium here.

Dad was a capitalist. Not the idiot, opportunistic, growth-grubbing kind, but one who believed in the rewarding virtue of hard work.

He did not love lucre; for him lucre was love, his way of expressing the desperate, anxious devotion he felt for his family, and his two boys in particular.

He had watched London burn from the front step of the council house in Booker Lane that was his home. Too far off for flames, just a red glow on the horizon. One day, he heard the drone of a bomber, assuredly not one of ours, approaching low and terrified as it sprinted vainly for home. Rushing into the garden, young Harry grabbed the nearest flint and flung it with all his might. He never knew whether the bomber made it back across the Channel, but he’d done his bit.

Now, fogged but not overcome by dementia, he wakes every day at the care home, a stone’s throw from Booker Lane, and declares his intention to “kill the bloody Germans.” Ibrahim, the open-hearted and weary Tunisian, reassures him: “Rommel is gone, Harry. Come on, it’s time for breakfast.”

Scrambling, clawing, conning his way out of his working-class beginnings, the teenaged Harry had donned suit, collar and tie and adopted a disconcerting received English that established him as Management.

He was a paper maker, employed beneath one of the chimneys that marked the path of the Chiltern Wye through the combe down to the Thames at Bourne End. With promotion to Production Manager came a company house, Gayhurst at the smart end of Totteridge Lane, a paradise for the boys and a monument to the gullibility of the management class: “He must be good, he dresses smart and he talks like Alvar Lidell.”

Christmas at Gayhurst was a celebration of the Great British Post-war Dream, a technicolour outpouring of love, laughter and material comfort. But, being British, especially war-child, self-made, middle-class British, there was an undercurrent of hypocrisy to the generosity and warm-spirits.

Harry’s demon was bitterness, the grudge against Mum’s family that haunted him and their marriage all their days. Steve “Curley” Fay and his wife Pearl (Curley and Pearly) were from Rutland Avenue, see? They didn’t want their Elaine spending time with that rough boy from Booker Lane.

The fire of that injustice ignited Harry’s material ambition and shaped his existence but, demon as it was, it also meant that every Christmas brought a curse. He had to welcome Curley, Pearly and Curley’s brother Uncle Dick (I am fairly certain that Uncle was his first name) and bless them with his bounty of turkey, Christmas pudding and Stone’s ginger wine.

For Harry, it was bad enough that he had to host his own parents and his sister Astrid, who was schizophrenic. Jean and Big Harry (more correctly, Big ’Arry) were inescapable reminders of where he had come from and who he was.

Jean, like Pearly, was relentless Welsh, with all the bustling energy of a Celtic matriarch. Harry adored her but he could not have taken her to the Rotary Club.

Big ’Arry was “Larndon”, the Arsenal, a corporal in the military police who was first ashore at Sicily and the Italian beaches, making sure the other buggers got off the landing craft. He smoked, read the Reveille and very occasionally played a sweet-toned harmonica that spoke of a lost love somewhere north of Montecassino.

Pearly had had a stroke in her early fifties, losing her speech centres and her mobility. Tough, dumb, ex-boxing champ Curley, flat-nosed and cauliflower-eared, cared for her for twenty years without a word of complaint.

Pearly would sit plump and rosy-cheeked in the corner, occasionally asking after “the girl, the girl” – her granddaughter, Nicola – or admonishing Curley for his rare lapses into bad language. She would wag an expressive forefinger and utter the word that struck terror into the soul of anyone from the respectable streets of Ammanford: “Vicar!”

Curley’s Birthday was December 26th. At midnight every Christmas Day, Aunty Astrid would emerge from the study and present him with a pair of socks.

“Happy Birthday, Mr. Fay,” she would shout.

She always shouted, not because of her condition but because of living with Jean, who was hard of hearing, probably after too many hours of making wings for Mosquito pathfinder bombers on the Cressex estate during the war.

Back then mental illness was frightening and strange. Astrid would spend every Christmas day in the study, so-called because we didn’t go in there much. She sat by the fireplace, smoking and smoking (it killed her in her forties), and, occasionally, terrifyingly, laughing like Dwight Frye in the hold of Dracula’s boat at Whitby harbour.

All the older Constables smoked, and dad smoked a pipe until his forties, but none of the Fays did. It may be that Uncle Dick was a smoker, but his defining quality was Ind Coope or whatever bottled ale was close at hand. He was deep London Welsh, ex Welsh Guards, ruddy, cherubic and genial. We only ever saw him at Christmas. He always got the best chair in the lounge because, somehow, he deserved it.

There were spiralled crepe decorations bouncing across the ceiling, draped with lametta that fell every time you opened the door. It would still be tangling the hoover brushes in February. And there was a Christmas tree, aglow like the London skyline with lights and tinsel, and, at its base, more presents than were ever good for us.

It never felt like greed or soulless materialism. For the boy who carried his sister to school on his back because mum was making bombers and dad was haranguing squaddies, the toys, turkey and tinsel were expressions of love, assurance for himself that his beloved Elaine and their two darling boys would want for nothing.

And perhaps, at the heart of it, was the proof that he had risen far beyond his Booker Lane origins to become worthy of a girl from the bay windows of Rutland Avenue. It was the chance to rub the noses of those bloody Fays in it once and for all.