James and the Snowman

A sequel

It was certainly the most remarkable thing that had ever happened to him, and James knew
that nothing so outlandish would ever occur again. That now-distant cold, snowy night before
Christmas of nearly fifty years ago had been such a central part of his life, but one that he no
longer shared with anyone else. Yes, it had been a gift, a blessing, something utterly special,
but it was also a curse, something that made him feel different, an outsider from everyone else
he met. It was a unique, unrepeatable experience, a wonderful, utterly extraordinary episode
that he had yearned to be part of once again. But he had finally accepted that it would not
come again. Even though that distant magical evening belonged firmly in the realm of his
childhood, now almost in his imagination, it still reverberated down the years.

Sometimes he doubted that it had ever happened, that it had been some sort of dream or
trance that had convinced him his snowman had been alive. All that he had learnt of science
and his investigations into the wholly unreliable world of the supernatural had told him that
what had happened to him was utterly impossible.

In the intervening years he had tried to get accustomed to feeling different, but it was
difficult, and James just wondered what it would be like to be normal, and indeed how his life
would have been different had he not witnessed the coming to life of his snowman on that
wonderful night in 1970.

It was now mid-December, a quiet Tuesday afternoon, with dusk gathering early and murky
shadows forming in the corners of his living room. It was cold and misty, but there was no
forecast for snow, and indeed there had been no substantial snowfalls in his small town of
Briggston in Norfolk for some years now; unlike his childhood, when it seemed to snow
every winter on their isolated house and garden. The trees and shrubs in his own garden were
denuded of their leaves, which were lying in untidy, slushy piles on the borders. He supposed
he should have tidied them up – it wasn’t as if he did not have the time now to do it. But
somehow, when he had so much free time to do these sorts of jobs, they did not seem to get
done.

He had not been back to see his childhood home since it had been surrounded by an estate of
unattractive houses not that long after he had left home to start work. His parents had sold the
house when the plans for the development of the area had been published; they bought a small
bungalow in a local village, and both of them had died a number of years ago. James had no
brothers and sisters, no one with whom he could share those distant events of Christmas 1970.
He had tucked away and then forgotten in his teenage years in his bedroom somewhere the
scarf that was the only tangible evidence of that night before Christmas, and had thought
nothing more about it when he left home and, later, when his parents sold the house. As an
adult in his twenties and thirties, James had been able to establish a degree of mental distance
from that night with the snowman. It was as he grew older, that he thought more of the
episode and how it had such a central role upon his subsequent life.

This was the first winter since James had retired from his career as a local government officer,
and the chilly days were long and rather uneventful. He had not particularly cared for his job
at the end of his working life, and found very few of his work colleagues congenial
companions. Retirement seemed a welcome change from the familiar daily slog of his ever-
increasingly resource-constrained office work. He had formed a number of vague plans to
occupy his time when he left in the summer, but so far he not organised himself to do much.
And each day now just seemed to dribble past. In the New Year, he promised himself that he
would start to do something positive – travel maybe, or look at starting a hobby, rather than
rely upon the newspaper and television for his meagre diet of entertainment. He also needed
to take more exercise – while he had been a deskbound worker for most of his adult life, he
had also been more active. These days, he just drove to the shops when he needed anything,
cleaned his house and did a little unenthusiastic gardening.

The thud of the door knocker disturbed these thoughts, and as he had suspected, it was just an
Amazon delivery for the new Polish family who had moved in to the rented house next door
earlier in the year. They had a regular stream of packages and parcels, and he was quite
content to take anything in for them during the week. When one of the couple collected their
post in the evenings they were polite and exchanged a few sentences in their heavily-accented
English, though the dark-haired woman had much a better command of the language and
seemed more willing to engage in polite small-talk than her rather intimidating-looking
shaven-headed partner. They had a small boy, Jakub, he thought his name was, who could
have been about the same age as James was when he had the snowman adventure.
Occasionally he saw him listlessly kicking a football around the scruffy patch of garden in
their property, and he would be reminded of his own solitary, but mostly contented rural
childhood days.

James had remained a largely solitary being for most of his life, and he attributed this to his
snowman escapade. In his late teens and then early twenties, he had made a number of
attachments to girls he met at school and then at polytechnic. He enjoyed their company and
the rather inexpert fumblings of adolescent sex. But sooner or later, as the trust between them
deepened, he wanted to share that Christmas experience. And no-one believed him. Tracy,
Jane and Helen – none of them took him seriously; they all thought he was spinning a tale.
And when he had convinced them that he was in earnest, they had all different explanations –
that he had been experiencing a period of madness (or that he was mad), that it was a dream,
even that it was some form of near-death experience. It marked the start of the end of the
relationships, as James sensed their concern that they had landed a boyfriend who was a bit
whacky at best and even possibly severely deranged. If he felt sure that he had been flying
with a snowman (a fucking snowman) as one so elegantly put it as she choked with derision,
who knows what other bizarre behaviours were lying deep in his psyche ready to leap out and
accost them in the future

There was one, Jackie, who seemed to finally accept his account, who wasn’t suspicious or
incredulous, or expressed amusement or ridicule. But then he slowly came to understand that
she was damaged and needy, that she had her own disturbing delusions arising, he judged,
from an abused childhood.

He had never felt the same connection with anyone else as he did on that all-too short night
with the snowman. There was a oneness, a sense of unconditional connection, a complete
trust and friendship that he had never been able to recapture and would not be found again –
that he knew. It was ludicrous when he tried to think about it objectively, but there it was.

His former work colleagues had invited him to their Christmas lunch, at the Koh-i-Noor, the
nearest restaurant to his old office. It always seemed incongruous to go an Indian restaurant
for Christmas, besides he didn’t much like spicy food, and the going out to eat at this time of
year was always a trial – with loud and boisterous groups of workers desperately trying to
enjoy themselves, and tired and tetchy serving staff, serving overpriced horrors like turkey
Korma. He declined the invitation, claiming that he was going to be doing something else that
day, which was not a lie really, as he had no intention of wearing ludicrous party hats and
trying to make small talk with Janet or Bob from his office, who would still be complaining
about the same people and the same frustrations with their jobs, but do nothing about it.

On the following Saturday morning, he was looking through the newspaper that he had
collected from the nearby corner shop – the owner, a genial Sri Lankan often complained
about the decline in newspaper publication and readership, and claimed that it would not be
too long before the industry was dead; there would be no more printed newspapers and
everyone would get their news online. James felt a bit sorry for the man, behind the counter
from early morning to late evening of his spicy-smelling store. Occasionally his wife would
be there instead, a baleful and churlish presence who seemed to eye every customer as a
potential violent shoplifter. James bought some milk and a packet of mints from the
shopkeeper, returned home and sat by his gently-popping gas fire.

There was a metallic clang from outside – and a series of thumps, coming from the next door
Polish family with the unpronounceable family name. He peeked from behind the rather
yellowy net curtains to see what was afoot, but all he could see was the small boy Jakub
holding up a string of wire and bulbs, looking up. Presumably his father was on a ladder, and
James guessed that father and son were putting up some outside decorations – this was the
first time that anyone had attempted to make the adjacent property festive.

When he cleared his parents’ house he had kept their box of Christmas decorations – mostly
for sentimental reasons, as a link to his boyhood. But he never bothered in putting them up or
indeed had not bothered with a tree and certainly nothing to illuminate his house outside.
There was no point – there was no-one now to see them apart from himself, and he would
have felt faintly ridiculous in doing it anyway, when there were no children around to be
excited by the lights and tinsel. The decorations were no doubt sadly out of date; they had the
musty smell that he associated with his cold childhood home and at the attic where they were
stored. He should really through them away in the New Year.

The hammering and thumping went on for all morning and most of the afternoon. James was
too reticent to go out and see just what they were doing, but when darkness came, he could
see by the reflected shafts of red, green and blue lights on the garden shrubs, a lamppost and
the road that a range of gaudy Christmas lights had been attached to the house. After he had
cleared away his dinner, he decided to take a walk – he felt stale for being indoors and
indolent most of the day, and he did want to see just what sort of display they had put up.

It was quite a change from the usual drab night street scene. Jakub’s father had somehow
fixed a Father Christmas, and a small reindeer and a snowman onto front of the house, and
there were coloured, flashing lights hung around the fascia edges, as well as draped over a
spindly bush in the garden. It looked warm and inviting, and certainly no-one had done
anything similar in the adjacent houses in recent years. Over the next few days, James noted
that passersby would stop to linger and gaze at the display in the evenings and occasionally
cars too, as they passed, would slow down to take in the lights.

In the middle of the following week, Mrs Xyz as he inwardly called her, came round to claim
another parcel left with him earlier in the afternoon. The lights reflected on her broad and
rather shiny face as she stood on the doorstep. James felt he needed to comment on the lights.

“They look nice”, was all he could think of saying.

She beamed in response, “Yes, in Łodz (which she pronounced as ‘Wodge’ for some
unearthly reason) we always liked to put up lots of lights on our houses for happy time at
Christmas. Thank-you now, bye-bye.”

The days crept on towards Christmas. James bought the two-week edition of the Radio Times
and marked the television programmes that he wanted to watch during the (for him) quiet
seasonal time. It was a tradition that he continued from his childhood, when his mother would
buy the magazine from town and they would looked with excitement at films and Christmas
specials to enjoy when they had to be watched at the time and couldn’t be recorded or found
on You Tube. Even the television listings were now easily available online, but James liked
that sense of continuity with the past, and circled the television programmes he wanted to
watch.
It was the evening of the December 22nd, and the BBC weather forecaster bounced round in
her excitement at the possibility of “significant snowfalls” in the eastern and southern parts of
England, with bookmakers reducing odds on the prospect of a white Christmas, though why
anyone should risk money on something that was so arbitrary and difficult to predict was
beyond James. During the reduced daylight hours, the sky had certainly a grey, laden look
that seemed to foretell a burden that needed to be relieved. He had had to put the lights on at
around half-past three to in order to read, and darkness soon followed.

It was another night when he struggled to sleep. Waking at two, he felt alert and restless.
Padding out into the chill bedroom air to use the toilet, he was aware of a strange brightness
beyond the curtained windows, and when he peeked out he could see a cascade of gently
falling snow in the street lights, and already the gardens and road as well as the parked cars
were covered in a layer of snow. Despite his age, he still felt a distant thrill of childish
excitement at this transformation of the quiet night-time scene, one that was also linked to his
long ago memories of that night with his snowman. Back in bed, he felt more settled and
secure, somehow, and drifted off to a better, peaceful sleep.

Waking quite late, there was little sound from outside – there was no noise of early
commuters leaving for work in their cars, and there was that muffled, peaceful sense that
comes with snow. When he looked it had stopped snowing, but the skies were grey, looking
cold and distant.

After his breakfast, he trudged out in his old wellington boots to buy his newspaper, the snow
squeaked and slid under the treads of his black footwear – good, dry firm snow for building.
Although the schools had finished for the holidays, there did not seem to be many children
out and about playing. The roads were quiet and the shopkeeper ruefully observed that some
of the papers hadn’t been delivered. Back home, James took his boots to the back door to dry
on the mat and looked out at his snow-laden garden. And, without really thinking any more,
on a whim he put his coat, gloves and boots back on and went outside.

And he started to roll the body of a snowman on the area of lawn towards the wall at the
bottom of his garden. He looked up and saw two figures at an upstairs window of the house
next door – without staring, he thought there were Jakub and his mother, possibly puzzled as
to what the strange old (well, to them anyway) man next to them was doing in the snow. He
felt acutely self-conscious under their gaze, especially as they didn’t seem to want to move.
And he thought of seeing his mother looking fondly and indulgently out of the window as he
played in the snow, on his own then as he was now. So he rested after doing some
compacting, and then, again unlike his usual reticent behaviour, beckoned Jakub to come and
join in the task of constructing a snowman. He supposed he would feel a little less ridiculous
if there was a child doing it with him.

The voyeurs left the window and after a couple of minutes, Jakub, in hat and scarf and bulky
green coat came around the opened gate at the side of the house.

“Do you want to help?” James asked. “It’s easier with two”,

“Ok, that’s cool”.

They set to, and exchanging a few words as they rolled, patted and pressed, getting their
gloves soaked, with James’s eyes and nose streaming in the chill air.

When they had built what seemed a mere approximation of the snowman James had
constructed as a child, he went indoors to fetch a hat and scarf, while Jakub scrabbled round
in the snow to look for some stones to mark the snowman's face and for buttons down his
front. The gate opened and Jakub’s mother came in with two steaming mugs of hot chocolate.

“Hey, this guy looks good”, she said. “Thank-you for inviting Jakub over – it’s a good idea to
get outside and do something different from that X-Box of yours”, she said looking fondly at
Jakub, who just shrugged in response.

“Well, it’s a sort of tradition, I suppose” James replied, “It’s something I did when I was a
boy when we had snow, and we didn’t have Zed-Boxes or anything like that.”

When the drinks had been consumed Jakub and his mother returned to their house and James
went indoors, to remove his sodden gloves and warm up his raw and red hands. The snowman
stood in the middle of the lawn, amidst the churned up snow, looking back at the house.

There was a little more snow in the afternoon, and the skies remained relentlessly grey, again
it got dark early. James thought much about that wonderful Christmas of his childhood, when
he was convinced that something utterly bizarre and yes, supernatural, had happened to him.
He supposed this renewed connection with the past was promoted by the impulse to build the
snowman and that this was his first Christmas since his retirement, which had given him more
time and scope, somehow, to dwell on those wistful memories. He watched a traditional
Christmas film in the afternoon and after more festive television in the evening and then the
news, he went to bed. The snowman stood in the silence of the garden, visible in the
reflecting whiteness. He wound the old chiming clock that he had rescued from his parents’
house, before he went upstairs – the noise of the chimes was another comforting connection
with times that had disappeared.

Sleep came quickly, but he woke with a jolt, as if he had been disturbed. The house seemed
quiet though, until he sensed the familiar whirr of the clock as it was about to chime. He
looked at the bedside light – midnight, and a shock of memory thrilled through him. He knew
it was not possible, but he still had to go and look. The twelve chimes plodded gently out and
James left his bed, pulled on the dressing gown that hung on a hook at the back of the door
and moved over to the window. He pulled the curtains aside, hardly daring to see what was
there. He looked upon the silent garden, and all seemed undisturbed. He stood for a time, then
let the curtain drop and walked downstairs, to the back door. He had put on a light, unlocked
the catch and threw open the door - the light streamed out and faintly illuminated the sentinel
figure on the lawn.

It was still. There was no movement and no noise at all from the neighbourhood. All was at
peace. James stood there for what seemed to him a long time, possibly five or it could have
been twenty minutes. He shivered in the cold and waited. But it was just him and the silent,
steely, breathless air. He knew that this was how it would be and indeed, how things should
be. There was no sense of disappointment as he closed and relocked the door, and slowly
climbed the stairs back to bed.

The cold continued for the whole of Christmas week. More snow fell, and unlike that time of
his childhood, when a sudden thaw had given James an early and painful message about the
ephemeral nature of life and happiness, the snowman remained impassively in the garden,
unchanging and stationery. Each day and at night, James looked at the snowman and
cherished that which would now remain with him until it was his own turn to melt and fade
away as if he had never been.

© Douglas Kemp - Christmas 2018