Dear Santa.. Please bring me some nice toys and a hymn book. Love Christine (age 5 1/2)
Found up a chimney 77 years on, a child’s letter you’d never read today
THESE days it seems that nothing short of the latest Xbox or an iPad will do for youngsters.
But in a charming reminder of a time when humbler gifts made a child’s Christmas magical, a little girl’s letters to Santa have been found up a chimney 77 years after she left them there.
Slightly singed but otherwise remarkably intact, one of the yellowing, handwritten notes reads: ‘Dear Father Xmas, Please bring me some nice toys and a hymn book. Age 5½. Love Christine.’
It was found during renovations of what was the nursery of the Grade-II listed Georgian house where its author, then Christine Way, was raised.
By chance the new owners of Garthmyl Hall in Powys, Mid-Wales, know Christine – who is now Christine Churchill – and contacted her about her touchingly simple Christmas list from 1938.
Yesterday Mrs Churchill, 82, who lives three miles away in Montgomery, said: ‘I was just flabbergasted to see the letters. I remember we were told to put them up the chimney but I have a feeling we gave them to nanny to put there because we couldn’t reach.
‘They just go to show what changes have come about. We had very simple wants. I do remember wanting my own hymn book. I wonder how many children now ask for a hymn book? I get absolutely aghast with how materialistic we have become, especially at Christmas.’
In a second letter, only part of which survived, she listed her requests to Santa as: ‘A dolly’s house, and a dolly case and a box of crayons and please may I have a pair of scissors and please may I have a dolly.’
Widow Mrs Churchill, whose family owned the house near the village of Berriew from 1883 to 1985, said: ‘I do remember getting a small doll. I think the case was for dolly’s clothes and hairbrush. Scissors were forbidden at that age, but I liked doing cut- outs of trees and animals so I always wanted a pair.’
She lived at the house with her parents, Stella and Harold Way, known as Dick, who was a captain in the Royal Artillery in World War One before becoming a land agent with interests in orange estates in South Africa.
When she was 21 she went to London to work as a secretary. After her father’s death in 1968, she moved back in to look after her mother.
She married her second husband Richard Churchill in 1977, the couple having met when she bought a wood burning stove from him to keep down heating costs of the house, which she was running as a bed and breakfast, as she had a plentiful supply of firewood.
She sold up in 1985. But the letters remained undiscovered until Julia Pugh, 28, its fourth owner since then, began building work to restore it to its former glory.
Recalling her childhood Christmases, Mrs Churchill said: ‘We had simple presents. My younger brother Martin had little wooden building bricks and a jigsaw puzzle and I had my dollies. Every year there would be stockings with a tangerine in the toe, with a twoshilling piece and perhaps a book – just one or two little things. We had to put the money in a money box – we weren’t allowed to spend it.
‘The stockings were done up very beautifully by my mother and we were absolutely thrilled with them. Christmases were very special. Children now don’t appreciate things because they have more than they can cope with.’