I regret I start with grimness in my Christmas column this year. Perhaps it is good to remember that for countless millions in the world this is, as T S Eliot reminded us in the greatest poem ever written about the birth of Christ, “Just the worst time of the year.” So this column records an event which I still remember once cast a shadow for me over the festival of goodwill and love and peace.
Soon after I joined the old Bookers years and years ago the last shipment of mules in the history of the sugar industry arrived in Port Georgetown. There were about 300 tall, strong Texas mules, frustrated and angry after their long sea voyage. The flimsy means to contain them on delivery at Thom and Cameron wharf proved ridiculously inadequate. They broke loose and ran marvellously wild through the town. For days, Texas mules were still being found and lassoed in various parts of the city. It was the last great mule stampede and the whole town laughed.
That morning long ago I was reminded of the great, uproarious mule run. But then, in a flash of man’s inhumanity, laughter turned to bitter disgust. Let me describe, in this Christmas season, what happened, if you will believe it.
My office was on the second floor of then Bookers Universal Building and through my window I looked down on bustling Church Street, the heart of town, opposite the National Museum. It was morning and the season’s crowd was already thick, including many children. The scene was being enlivened by a bull which had earlier got loose, found his way into this Christmas shopping mall, and for a time created a Pamplona bull run all on his own. He had been caught and tied but was still charging about at the end of the rope. It all looked humorous more than dangerous as the bull put his horns down threateningly and various young people ran round him daring the beast to charge, trying to touch his horns and get away again, playing the fool. But such games could not be allowed to continue and it was a good thing when some men came up and, after a brief struggle, secured the animal, tied its feet and head, and turned it on its back. A cart came up to carry away the now tightly roped animal – and I turned back to continue to my office work. The fun was over.
Indeed it was. Something I saw out of the corner of my eye, or some scream I heard, made me look back out the window. What I saw made my blood freeze and my skin burn with shame. Do you know the feeling? One of the men was slaughtering the tethered animal. He took a long knife and very deliberately cut its throat. There in the middle of Church Street, in the middle of Christmas, in full view of shoppers and children and no doubt passing visitors, the man slaughtered the struggling animal and the blood burst out in bucketfuls over the street and the white-washed parapet with its rows of flowers.
It was a frozen moment of disbelief. The men heaved the animal in its death throes onto the cart and trundled it away. Except for the blood in bucketfuls on the road like spilled red paint it might have been a bad dream in the bright morning.
When my stomach settled and I caught myself I rang the Mayor to register my fury and disgust. But the Mayor was not available. So I rang the Town Clerk. He was available and responded promptly, though hardly believing that such a thing could really have happened. At least he was able very quickly to send men who removed the huge stains of blood soaking the roadway and the flower-beds.
Was this a sign of the brutal times? Of standards fallen so low that slaughtering a helpless animal in the middle of Christmas shopping was greeted with a shrug? Was I over-reacting in my anger and disgust? Perhaps, after all, to kill a bull in the High Street instead of an abattoir was nothing much in an age of the death squads then operating in Colombia, the apartheid torture and prison killings in South Africa, and the atrocities which never end, then or now, around the world. All I record is that for me a shadow passed over the season that morning.
It is perhaps an unsuitable story to re-tell at this Christmas time when all should be jollity and good cheer. We deserve a little relief from the problems that all year-long never slacken. Except, of course, that Christmas, in its origins and at its core, is not really about festivity and gifts and feteing and fun. For one thing, it is about a bare manger where cattle made room for the Christ Child to start him on his long journey to Golgotha. The dying bull haunted me. I could not get out of my mind a picture I once saw of the greatest masterpiece wrought by Benvenuto Cellini, the mediaeval Italian sculptor and craftsman. It is a crucifix carved from white Carrara marble that hangs in the Escorial near Madrid. Looking at that anguished figure of light in the gloom of the Escorial one begins to understand Pascal’s meaning when he bade mankind stay awake because Christ is in agony until the end of time.
Still I do not want to leave it at that on this Christmas day. I prefer to end with the beautiful poem by Ted Hughes celebrating the fearful joy and triumphant promise of Christmas.
The Minstrel’s Song
I’ve just had an astounding dream as I lay in the straw.
I dreamed a star fell on to the straw beside me
And lay blazing. Then when I looked up
I saw a bull come flying through a sky of fire
And on its shoulders a huge silver woman
Holding the moon. And afterwards there came
A donkey flying through that same burning heaven
And on its shoulders a colossal man
Holding the sun. Suddenly I woke
And saw a bull and a donkey kneeling in the straw,
And the great moving shadows of a man and a woman –
I say they were a man and a woman but
I dare not say what I think they were. I did not dare to look.
I ran out here into the freezing world
Because I dared not look. Inside that shed.
A star is coming this way along the road.
If I were not standing upright, this would be a dream.
A star the shape of a sword of fire, point-downward,
Is floating along the road. And now it rises.
It is shaking fire on to the roofs and the gardens.
And now it rises above the animal shed
Where I slept till the dream woke me. And now
The star is standing over the animal shed.
