Gabriel Jeroschewitz, November 17th, 2025, inspired. By Dylan Thomas, and his beautiful Christmas poem.
The Year of the Ice-Lipped Moon and the Incident with Mrs. Pettifore
It was a Christmas so much like the others that I cannot swear whether the snow came in six-day barrels when I was twelve, or in twelve-day rivers when I was six. All the Decembers of my early life were ladled from the same steaming pot of white nonsense — all tumbling down toward the edge of our sea-bound town like a drunken moon with frost-bitten cheeks.
There, at the rim of the fish-freezing shore, I would plunge my mittened hands into the memory-snow and pull out whatever my fingers could hook: a whiff of burnt plum pudding, a shriek from someone’s aunt, a cat with political ambitions. I have found many things in those snowdrifts over the years, but the finest discovery, and the one that holds its own particular corner in my brain, was Mrs. Pettifore and the firemen. It was on the afternoon before Christmas Eve — the hour when the world is between essential events and idle mischief — that I leaned against the frost-crusted wall of Mrs. Pettifore’s garden, waiting for cats with her son Gregory. We were equipped with socks on our hands (for stealth), fur hats pulled low over our eyes (for intimidation), and a bucket of ammunition in the form of compact, professionally produced snowballs.
These cats, mind you, were no ordinary Christmas cats — sleek as black-market otters, long as a council meeting, and with whiskers so bristled they could have been used to rouse an orchestra. Gregory and I were sure they were spies for the rival street, and thus deserving of a swift pummelling. We squatted like Hudson Bay trappers who had somehow been stationed for duty in Suburban Wales, our eyes narrowed to slits, our breath whispering steam into the muffling silence.
The wise cats, as wise cats do, never appeared. In that deep, hush-laden stillness, Mrs. Pettifore’s first cry did not carry to us as one would expect. To our ears, it sounded more like the distant braying of a feral seal — or possibly the taunting of the neighbour’s most obnoxious tabby. But the cry grew sharper.
“Fire!” she roared, with sufficient force to knock three icicles off the kitchen eaves. And, as if conducting an orchestra of calamity, she began walloping the dinner gong. The sound clanged across the garden like armour falling down a stairwell.
Gregory and I ran, arms full of snowballs, down the path toward the house. Smoke — grey as boiled socks, thick enough to be cut into slabs for winter fuel — poured from the dining room. Mrs. Pettifore was dancing in the hallway like the tragic heroine of an opera whose words nobody knew.
This was far. We lunged to the open door of the dining room, expecting flames, but found instead Mr. Pettifore standing in a cloud of smoke, slipper in hand, swiping at the air like a conductor leading an orchestra composed entirely of invisible trombones. He looked almost pleased.
“A fine Christmas!” he declared, in the voice of a man announcing the birth of a particularly stubborn child.
“Call the fire brigade!” Mrs. Pettifore insisted, belting the gong again.
“They won’t come. It’s Christmas,” Mr. Pettifore said, with the serenity of a man who has accepted that several rooms may burn before dessert.“Do something!” Mr. Pettifore bellowed, and we obeyed. We hurled our snowballs into the smoke, the dining table, and — I suspect — into a partially completed trifle. It didn’t help, but it made us feel heroically involved.
Then we raced to the red telephone box at the corner to summon the brigade. Gregory suggested calling the police, the ambulance, and “Old Benny Wilks, he loves a burnin’,” but we limited ourselves to the official channels.
The fire engine arrived in a roar of brass and hose, three helmeted titans tumbling out to wrestle the incident into submission. Water was sprayed. Mr. Pettifore escaped just in time, muttering something about the “state of British engineering.”And that is when she arrived — Miss Caroline Pettifore, who was Gregory’s cousin, my own senior by three years, and possessed of hair like molten chestnut polished under winter light. She was visiting from Cardiff for the holidays, the sort of visitor who made even the milkman wear his clean cap.
She appeared on the stairs in her dressing gown, blinking through the smoke. Everyone stopped — even the firefighters — for there was something about the way she held herself, chin high, as if the entire situation were merely an overly dramatic prelude to tea.
“Would you gentlemen care for something to read?” she asked the firemen, her voice the sound of warm sherry being poured.
One of them coughed into his helmet.
I was smitten in the way only a boy can be smitten who has just seen someone offer Dickens to three men in smoke-stained uniforms.
The next day was one of those sprawling Christmases that seem to last forty-eight hours and involve at least fifteen varieties of alcoholic pudding. Uncles moved about like great woolly furniture, Aunt Dorothea wore three scarves simultaneously, and Mrs. Pettifore insisted the incident of the previous day was “good luck.”
The presents were distributed in the chaotic Pettifore method: someone shouted, someone rummaged, and someone inevitably unwrapped a gift meant for someone else. There were the practical presents: socks with a circumference fit for elephants, mufflers large enough to double as tents, mittens so ambitious they seemed to be auditioning for the role of glove for a giant. And there were the useless presents: a kazoo shaped like Napoleon, a bottle labelled “Instant Fog — For Romance and Misunderstandings,” two tins of biscuits that rattled suspiciously, and a small mechanical penguin whose job remained unclear.
It was among this chaos that Caroline and I found ourselves alone in the hallway, inspecting the contents of a box addressed to “Unknown Recipient.” Inside was a paper kite painted with the sort of colours that made the eyes wince — crimson, violent blue, and an orange that was almost morally wrong.
Caroline ran her fingers along its edge.
“This,” she said, “should be flown somewhere dangerous.”
I agreed instantly, though I had no plan in mind.
That afternoon, under the bruised winter sky, we carried the kite down to the frozen shore. The sea lay flat and sullen, the colour of tarnished spoons, the air sharp enough to shave an icicle. We stood side by side, our gloves brushing in a way that made a boy forget every previous ambition except for more brushing.
She held the string delicately, as if it might have a secret. The wind took the kite up, jerking it toward the horizon, and I stood behind her, keeping watch in case it decided to dive into the waves. The absurdity of the day — the firemen, the mufflers, the mechanical penguin — seemed to fold itself neatly under that moment.
Without looking at me, she said, “I’m glad the house didn’t burn down.”
“So am I,” I replied. “Or else… we might not be here.”
And then, in that cold, ridiculous setting — wearing a borrowed fur hat two sizes too big, holding a kite painted like a carnival crime — I kissed her. It was brief, soft, and filled with the kind of clumsy determination that comes with youth and mittens.
She didn’t laugh. She only smiled, and for an instant the wind seemed to hold its breath.
We returned to find the Pettifores in a whole digestive battle with the remnants of Christmas dinner — Mr. Pettifore carving something that might have been poultry, though it had the stubbornness of beef. Caroline slipped away to fetch more tea, and I sat watching the steam rise from the cups as if I might decode some meaning from it.
That year, that moment, fixed itself like a snowflake in amber. Every Christmas after, whether six nights of snow or twelve, whether cats appeared or not, whether fires broke out or only puddings, I found myself back on that icy shore in my mind — the wind, the kite, her smile, and my belief that time might, just for once, stand politely still.
Years later, I would hear she married a man from Bristol with a talent for building musical furniture. And I would smile, thinking, Yes, that makes perfect sense. But in my mind, she is still the girl who offered books to firefighters and held a screaming kite above a freezing sea on a day the moon slid drunkenly over our town.
