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week.
    Oranges For Christmas – A Childhood Memoir was a good book. I liked it a lot. I wasn’t bitter that it cast a massive shadow over my own half-baked dreams of writing for a living. It deserved its success.
    The book was about my father’s childhood in the East End, about how they were poor but happy, and how my dad and his army of brothers and sisters almost died of joy if they got an orange for Christmas.
    Oranges For Christmas is full of dirty-faced urchins having a rare old time hunting for rats on bomb sites while their next-door neighbours are being blown up by the Luftwaffe. There is a lot of death, disease and rationing in Oranges For Christmas but the reason it sold so well is because it is ultimately as comforting as a cup of hot, sweet tea and a milk chocolate digestive. For all the gritty anecdotes about polio, nits and the Nazis, my old man’s book is endlessly sentimental about a kind of family that no longer seems to exist.
    And that’s ironic because Oranges For Christmas dropped like one of Hitler’s doodlebugs among my father’s family. His brothers and sisters were all happily settled into respectable middle age by the time Oranges For Christmas appeared. Suddenly their adventures of half a century ago were in the public domain.
    My dad’s eldest sister, my Auntie Janet, did not appreciate my dad telling the world about the time their own father had caught Janet jacking off a GI during a blackout. In the book the story was told as loveable, where-are-my-trousers farce, but the revelation caused a sensation at Auntie Janet’s branch of the Women’s Institute, where to this day she remains chief jam-maker.
    My dad’s brother Reg also hit the roof when he saw Oranges For Christmas . A bank manager in the Home Counties for many years, Uncle Reg felt my father had gone too far by revealing how one night during the Blitz, Reg, then four years old, had struggled into the Anderson air raid shelter in their back garden with his pants around his ankles and his tiny winkle quivering with fear. Uncle Reg felt that wasn’t the image a bank manager should project to his customers in the current market.
    Then there was Uncle Pete, a teenager in the book, whose exploits in the black market made many a young housewife with no nylons and a husband at the front willing to – as Pete called it – “put the kettle on”. Uncle Pete – or Father Peter as he is known these days – had a lot of explaining to do to his congregation.
    Auntie Janet giving executive relief to a young American soldier bound for the beaches of Normandy, Uncle Reg wetting his pants as the bombs dropped, Uncle Pete exchanging his virginity for a pair of nylons – the reading public loved this stuff. And thanks to Oranges For Christmas , everybody loves my old man. Apart from all his brothers and sisters and most of the people he grew up with in the old neighbourhood.
    They don’t talk to him any more.
     
    When you come back home after living abroad, you see your country with the eyes of a time traveller.
    I was gone for just over two years, from the spring of 1996 to the summer of 1998. That’s not very long at all, but now time seems somehow dislocated. A lot of that is to do with Rose, of course. When I left I didn’t know she existed, and now that I am back I don’t know how I can live without her.
    But it’s not just about Rose, this sense of displaced time.
    It’s there when I am driving my dad’s car, looking at a newspaper, eating a meal with my parents. Everything is just a little bit out of whack.
    There are refugees on the Euston Road for a start. That’s new. I see them from my father’s Mercedes-Benz SLK. And the refugees see me, because my old man’s little red roadster is a car that is designed to attract attention, although probably not from people who have recently fled poverty and persecution.
    There were no refugees on the Euston Road when I went away. You got the odd drunk with his hopeful bucket but