A Birthday Without Presents

My eighth birthday was on a Friday, and, as a treat, my dad had promised to take me to Salisbury, where the shops were open until nine o’clock at night, in order that I could choose a birthday present for myself. The colossal sum of two whole pounds had been set aside for this purpose – enough to purchase ten ‘How and Why Wonder Books’ had I been so inclined, although I was sure I would be able to find something even more tantalising if I looked long enough.

To be made a fuss of like this was especially agreeable given that my baby sister Angela, born less than two months previously, had occupied the undisputed central position in both my parents’ – and Barbara’s – affections for what I considered to be a grotesquely excessive period of time. After all, she did nothing all day except eat, sleep, cry, pee and poo – I could do all of that, and more.

During the train journey from Womma to Salisbury I did, I thought, a commendable job of keeping my churning sense of anticipation more or less in check. As things turned out, this was quite fortunate, for no sooner had we disembarked from the train at Salisbury station than my dad informed me that he did not have sufficient money to give me the two pounds he had promised. He then endeavoured to console me by adding that he hoped to have it in a week’s time, but if I could not wait that long, he could afford to let me have ten shillings today instead.

If a week is a long time in politics, it is an eternity in the mind of an eight year old. Besides, the whole point of our trip to Salisbury was, I had been led to believe, to enable me to choose a birthday present for myself. Gravely disappointed though I was therefore, I nevertheless had little hesitation in selecting immediate gratification, however partial, over the unimaginably distant prospect of boundless wealth. Having spent most of the preceding week in a state of ever-increasing anticipation – the equivalent, if you like, of foreplay – and the journey from Womma to Salisbury in a condition of intense arousal, I had effectively passed the point of no return, and to deny myself satisfaction now might well be damaging to my health.

Or, at any rate, so I reasoned.

My dad was predictably scathing. “Patience is a virtue,” he advised me, and went on to lecture me, at length, on the enormous range of inimical consequences likely to stem from weakness of character. I barely listened. Wasn’t honesty a virtue too? Why then did you lie to me, Dad? And why did you wait until we’d got to Salisbury to tell me that you weren’t going to give me the two pounds you’d promised?

I thought of asking all these questions, but I knew better. My dad would only do what he always did, which was to transfer the burden of blame and guilt onto me, for in the special, idiosyncratic universe that he inhabited, he was never wrong.

It developed into a somewhat tortuous, guilt-ridden night, with my dad continually expressing his disappointment at my ‘weakness of will’ and lack of patience. He even accused me of being greedy, and “Greed is one of the seven deadly sins”, he somewhat sanctimoniously informed me. It seemed clear to me, even then, that the entire situation had been deliberately engineered by my dad as a kind of test, and that by failing it I was effectively declaring myself to be morally redundant. How many more thousands of years of purgatorial agony could I expect to endure now, I wondered?

So much for a happy birthday……….

In the end, despite trembling physically with reluctance, uncertainty and guilt, I spent my ten shillings on a small model train set with a basic track layout, but one that could be continually expanded. It may not have been precisely what I had imagined buying earlier, but it was much better than going home with nothing, I decided.

Over the next few weeks I managed to extract a surprising amount of amusement from my ostensibly unremarkable purchase. Included in the box with the train and its basic oval of track was a leaflet detailing all the other trains, track types and accessories that you could buy to expand your layout, and I began planning to do just that.

Before I could implement my plans, however, we received a fateful visit from the Holty family who, having learned of our new arrival, were anxious to engage in the protracted sequence of billings and cooings stipulated by society as an appropriate means of acknowledging such an event. Thus, while Arthur and I retired to my bedroom to conduct a prolonged discussion on dinosaurs, or astronomy, or the development of powered flight, the adults sat around drinking tea and deluding themselves that the cacophony of scarcely human sounds they saw fit to make for Angela’s benefit were actually anything other than palliatives for their own intense unease.

Angela, in any case, carried on sleeping, oblivious.

Meanwhile Barbara, temporarily deprived of her current favourite toy, consoled herself by playing ‘Mum’ to Johann, Arthur’s eighteen month old brother. In a credible effort to amuse him, she gave him some of my toy cars to play with, which he ignored, and then the small train set that I had purchased for my birthday, with which he was immediately, and obsessively, besotted.

Later, as the Holty family was preparing to depart, my mum pulled me discreetly to one side. “Johann really seems to like that little train set of yours,” she remarked. “Why don’t you give it to him?”

I blinked up at her, unsure I had heard correctly. Mum, it seemed, was suggesting that I give Johann my recently acquired train set, which I liked, simply on the grounds that he, Johann, also appeared to like it. Was that really how things worked? If I manifested a liking for Arthur’s latest ‘How and Why Wonder Book’, or Charlie’s bike, would they be obliged to give them to me? Or was it perhaps a peculiarly Dutch custom, like fathers kissing their grown sons as they bade good-bye to them of a morning?

Presumably suspecting that I found her logic somewhat less than wholly persuasive, Mum changed tack slightly, and said. “Oh, come on, you wouldn’t want to disappoint him, would you? He’s only little.”

Then he’s got a whole lifetime of big disappointments ahead of him, I thought, and it would do him no harm to start getting used to it.

At that moment, Mrs Holty came over, carrying Johann. “Ve vaunt to tenk Chon for de luffly trenset, don’t ve Johann?”

Mouth open, thoroughly bemused, I stood there gaping like a landed fish. Try as I might, I could not recall the point at which I had agreed to a transaction of such dubious equitability.

Sensing that my beneficence was perhaps a touch less unequivocal than she had been led to believe, she judiciously unfurled an olive branch: “Unt Chon shell heff a How unt Why book!”

Which, I could not prevent myself from thinking, was worth at least six bob less than the train set. Did she expect me to dance with glee?

However, it all became academic when Mum interjected, “Oh, we wouldn’t hear of it. John’s getting much too big for such babyish toys anyway, aren’t you, John?”

Yes, I thought, since buying the thing a couple of weeks ago I’ve virtually doubled in size……. However, conscious that the slight pressure which my mum had just begun applying to my upper arm was tantamount to an injunction to obeisance, I merely muttered, “Yes”.

After the Dutch raiding party had departed, Mum helpfully explained to me that, by giving my train set to Johann, I had demonstrated possibly the most important of all virtues, generosity. “Generosity,” she told me, in all apparent seriousness, “is its own reward.”

For once not daring to venture a retort (although a certain ‘F’ word was balanced tentatively on my tongue), I simply sighed, thinking that this was, in all probability, the single most ridiculous thing I had ever heard my mum say. With the benefit of more than forty years of experience and hindsight, however, I can now see that it was probably among the wisest, for generosity spawns the most enriching and ennobling gift of all: appreciation.