No you don’t, his sister said, you only like the box with the picture on it, and we’re going to buy figs and nuts and tangerines, so there. A fat little boy with a red scarf wound round and round his neck was quarrelling with his older sister. They went to the greengrocer’s and waited in the long queue. She was thin and never had much appetite and there was no Grandpa or Grandma coming for Christmas dinner. Irina watched her and listened to every word, but when it was her mother’s turn she didn’t ask for anything. At the front of the queue a girl who was smaller than Irina reached up and pointed at the cakes and little pies sprinkled with icing sugar.Īnd some of those, she shouted, for Grandma! And the big cake! Grandpa likes cakes! The big cake! They went to the baker’s to buy bread and flour and had to wait in a long queue.
So her father stopped to talk to the dairyman at the corner and Irina went ahead with her mother to help with the shopping.
They lived on a farm and at Christmas everyone wants more cream and eggs and milk, and besides, they had to be back home in time to feed the animals. But Irina and her parents didn’t stop to listen to the carols because they had so much to do. The snow-covered square where the band was playing round the Christmas tree was hung around with coloured bulbs. When they reached the village, all the shop windows were already lit, making haloes of light in the fog. She only walked quietly on, looking down at her thick boots as they trod the hardened snow. But she didn’t look up and smile or turn to say Listen! to her mother and father. The cold pinched her thin cheeks, and the trees that grew on each side of the lane poked their black fingers through the freezing fog as if they were trying to clutch at her as she went by.Įven before they reached the first houses at the edge of the village, Irina heard the faint sound of a band playing Christmas carols. Her long fair plait hung down beside her. She was dressed in a sheepskin coat and boots and mittens and a sheepskin hat. Irina walked in front of her mother and father along the lane that led across the fields to the village. The sun was as thin and pale as a disc of ice in a sky as white as the snowy ground. It was Christmas Eve, and the afternoon had frozen as hard and milky as a pearl.
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