大象传媒

Anthony Peregrine recalls a memorable Christmas with his prospective in-laws...

French Christmas tradition dictates that the main meal, Revellion, is eaten on Christmas Eve - after midnight mass. I was introduced to the custom when I met my French future in-laws. They had disapproved of me from a distance for months. Farmers, from one of the most remote mountainsides in France, they couldn't understand why their daughter was gallivanting about with an Englishman. The Christmas invitation had thus been extracted by pliers by my intended. We returned from Midnight Mass at 1.00 am and sat down to a vegetable soup nourishing enough to walk across.

Courses came and went and conversation remained decidedly unfestive. I was feeling like the grit in the family machine when over the wine sauce, future father-in-law said, "the last time we had a foreigner here for the Revellion it was the Gestapo."

I hoped this revelation was leading to a story - it was. During the war, Germans soldiers had been conducting a Christmas Eve search for escaped Armenian prisoners. Five soldiers knocked, entered and were on the point of a thorough search of the house when my future father-in-law had the inspired idea of inviting them to join the family for the Christmas meal.

"They were tired, and a long way from home at Christmas, after all," said my host. They accepted, forgot the search and thus ate about 30 feet from where the Armenians were indeed hidden under a trapdoor in the barn. "It was an even tenser meal than tonight," said future father-in-law. I smiled back, vastly impressed.

He seemed to be saying I was welcome, well, more welcome than the Gestapo. In fact he had continued receiving refugees until the end of the war. This seemed a good moment to ask how future mother-in-law had enjoyed the Christmas pudding I'd sent them the previous year. "Not at all. It was inedible. Even the cat refused it." I asked her how long she steamed it for. "Steam it? I never steam cakes. I served it straight from the tin."