December 24 in the late 1940s, about 9pm. Light gleamed under my bedroom door from the kitchen, where my parents sat reading.
The light went off and my door slowly opened. I pretended to sleep. My father tiptoed in, laid something across the foot of my bed, tiptoed out.
I sat up, touched a pillowcase full of paper-wrapped objects. My more worldly school friends had told the truth. There was no Father Christmas.
A whole pillowcase? Yes, but half was full of shirts, shorts, jumpers for the year ahead. I'd toss them aside while Mum insisted how useful they'd be.
Then came the presents I coveted. Clunky tin racing cars and fighter planes with lead-based paint that got on your fingers and into your mouth.
A new tennis ball. A magician's fake ink-blot. A packet of balloons I'd take down the road to my friends, where we'd inflate them, then squeeze the neck so the air escaped with farting sounds. Ah, the sophistication.
They were all wrapped in paper from previous Christmases, re-used till it had become as soft as vellum. Santa was an early exponent of recycling.
Weet-Bix for breakfast, with cream and Dad's strawberries. Lying awake at 5am, I'd heard the milkman's truck stop-starting up our street; the clinking as he slid bottles into our letter box.
Straight after breakfast I'd be off to meet friends, if the weather was fine. It always is fine, in my memories of 1940s Christmases.
We'd compare presents. Our tin fighter planes would hold dogfights: new ones dazzling with their red-white-blue wing roundels; last year's with swastikas scratched on, to be shot down triumphantly.
Back home, fathers dug new spuds, picked peas, chopped pumpkin. Mothers got the leg of lamb out of the meat safe and cooked it on the wood or coal stove.
Kitchen temperatures would reach 30 degrees, in spite of every sash window being open. Flies circled maddeningly, or died noisily on sticky flypaper hanging from the ceiling. If mothers spent Christmas morning hot and flustered, then that was a woman's role in life.
Dinner at midday, with the best tablecloth spread. That lamb and those veges. A salad of limp lettuce leaves, chunks of tomato, maybe hard-boiled eggs. Tall bottles of beer for men and some women. Orange, green or yellow fizzy drink for kids.
Then trifle, icecream, jelly, more cream. A dish of wrapped toffees and chocolates. You could almost hear the crackle of teeth rotting and arteries narrowing.
It was just me and my parents at Christmas dinner. My uncles and aunts and cousins all lived at least 20km away and, in the post-war years when cars and telephones were still luxury items, calling or visiting on Christmas Day was logistically implausible.
After dinner, dishes were washed with yellow Sunlight Soap. Uneaten bits of lamb were wrapped in stiff white greaseproof paper and put away in the safe.
Then I was sent outside again to play, while my parents had "a little lie-down". If that was a euphemism for something else, the appalling concept never entered my mind.
At 4pm, my godparents from two doors away would arrive for drinks. A sweet sherry for Mrs Meechan and my mum; a whiskey for Mr Meechan and my dad. Both bottles lived at the back of our pantry's top shelf. By 5.30pm, they'd be back there till next Christmas.
My godparents were Scottish. She was a lilting-voiced, plump Highlander. He was a little, seamed, tattooed Glaswegian, who'd fought in one of the Bantam Regiments during World War I.
They were my parents' best friends. When Mr M died abruptly a few years later, I saw my mother weep for the first time. "He was a dear, brave man, sonny," she told me.
Dad said, "Couldn't have wished for a better pal, son," and went out to dig in the garden. The language was so lyrical, so elevated above their everyday discourse that I've remembered it ever since.
My godparents always brought me a Boys' Own Annual. I'd lie on my bed, gulp down stories of English Public Schools: Play Up, St Chads ... The Cad of The Sixth ... Carruthers Sees It Through, while they talked and laughed in the kitchen. I don't think I've ever felt so safe and contented.
The Meechans left sharp on 5.30pm. Almost immediately came tea. Cold meat; mint jelly; more new potatoes; more trifle; still more cream.
December 25 tea ended with one of Grandma's Christmas cakes. Mum would cut it with the precision of a brain surgeon, seeking the threepence that Grandma had hidden in it for me.
After tea, the King's Speech on our valve radio. Yes, "King": the late 1940s, remember? George VI painstakingly read his message to the British Empire, pausing midway through sentences to work on the breathing that mitigated his agonising stammer.
More dishes. Wrapping paper folded away. Kindling wood and old newspaper brought in for the stove, which would burn again tomorrow for another summer meal.
And so to bed, the usual 8pm for me, 9pm for my parents, as the pre-daylight saving evening darkened. All of us would be fretting: me because there were 365 sleeps before the next December 25; my parents because of their arteries.
Ideal for morning or afternoon tea, served with greek yoghurt and berries.