It was November in the early 1970s and, as usual, I had no money and no clue. And my mother wasn’t going to help with the latter. While everybody else in the Jeffries family would supply lists of gift ideas for Christmas – my father’s, for instance, included a woolly hat, Anna Karenina and a socket set – my mother gave no hint as to what she might like.
The gold standard for gift giving is that you produce a present that shows the recipient you know them better than they know themselves. They never knew they wanted salsa lessons or a velour jumpsuit, but thanks to you, they do now. Otherwise you might as well just give them the receipt so they can exchange your hopeless offering for something they’d actually like. Or short-circuit the whole process with tokens.
Then I watched Blue Peter and realised there could be a Christmas miracle in the Black Country in the early 70s. One of the presenters, probably John Noakes or Peter Purves, since it seems absurd to consider for a moment that someone as intelligent and sensible as Valerie Singleton would come up with an idea as doomed and sexist as this, told British kids that they could make a brush as a present. That could work, I told the telly. Mum would appreciate my handiwork and insight into her secret desires.
Television in the early 70s was always telling me what to do. Rather than lounging in my pants, I should be making something. Blue Peter and Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead? were incessantly advising my generation how to use sticky-backed plastic and washing-up liquid bottle tops. TV-viewing pre-pubescents were more productive in those days than British Leyland. Which isn’t saying much, but just highlights how much the British economy has always depended upon child labour.
I followed the instructions to the letter. First, I crept into my parents’ bedroom and nicked a wire coat hanger, then I bent it in two and unwound the hook to form a handle. Then I went to the bathroom and ran my bloodied hand under the cold tap for a bit. Next I asked my mother for two balls of wool of contrasting colours – ideally, one yellow and one blue. It seems very unlikely she wasn’t suspicious.
In my bedroom, I set to work, winding the wool around the metal frame, using the time-honoured skills from my maypole-dancing ancestors. When it was done, I realised that the handle needed work. As it stood, that sharp bare metal could put somebody’s eye out. It had already cut my finger. So I wound alternating blue and yellow wool around the handle until no bare metal could be seen and tied the pieces of wool into an unbreakable knot.
Next I cut 20 pieces of blue wool and 20 of yellow, each about a foot long, and tied them in alternating loops on to the frame of the coat hanger.
I examined my handiwork. This “brush” was a great disappointment. How could dangling woollen loops brush anything? They didn’t have the requisite stiffness. Perhaps I’d missed a vital stage in Blue Peter’s instructions. But in those days there were no repeats, no VCRs, no YouTube. TV shows were a one-shot deal and if you hadn’t grasped each step of the instructions immediately you were screwed.
There is another possibility. Perhaps Blue Peter never did tell me to make my mother a brush for Christmas. I must have dreamed it. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.
That Christmas morning, the Jeffries family gathered, as we did each year, on my parents’ bed to exchange presents. All three children had been awake for hours, playing with the presents we’d found in pillowcases at the feet of our beds. Outside, it still wasn’t light. Mum and Dad each had whisky in their tea, perhaps just to steel themselves for disappointment. I gave my mother her parcel. She opened it, smiled thinly. So far as I recall, she put it in a drawer. We never spoke of the matter again.
She certainly never used it and, because there was no receipt, she couldn’t exchange it for something she’d like.
Now, half a century on, I’m red with embarrassment as I write these words. My mother is 10 years dead and I will never know what happened to that brush. Perhaps she sadly unwound the wool and bent the coat hanger back into shape.
What I do know is that in those benighted days mothers often received presents – aprons, Kenwood Chefettes, brushes – that only confirmed them as domestic drones and seem predicated on giving them anything but joy. She deserved better.
