18 Even without knowing Great-Uncle Basil, I sort of felt as if I did because Dad talked about him all the time. Every family has someone like Great-Uncle Basil—or Great-GreatUncle Basil as he would have been to us. You know the type: did brave things during the Second World War, found life boring and routine afterward, couldn’t settle on anything, and used up a lot of his energy starting arguments with everyone. Oh, and he smoked a pipe. Since he never married and had children, and he was not on speaking terms with any member of the family except Dad, we found out after Great-Uncle Basil’s death that he had left us everything. There wasn’t a great fortune in his bank account by the time he died, but the house was ours. “If he fell out with absolutely everyone, Dad, why didn’t he fall out with you?” I asked at dinner the evening Dad told us we were moving. I was six at the time, and things tended to come out of my mouth before I thought about them. “It wasn’t me; it was your mother,” said Dad. “Every Christmas for twenty years, she sent him a Christmas cake. I think she thought he might be like Ebenezer Scrooge and discover the real meaning of Christmas that way.” Typical Mum, getting all her ideas from a book. So GreatUncle Basil was our very own Ebenezer Scrooge, who thought that Christmas was humbug and lived all alone, loathing everyone. And Mum was some kind of Ghost of Christmas Present, reaching out to him in his loneliness. Except that he never did have a change of heart and never did say, “God bless us every one!” But he did leave us a really big house! Not a bad exchange for twenty Christmas cakes. To be honest, the house looked a bit like something out of
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