Free Bryant & May and the Secret Santa by Christopher Fowler

When I was a child the highlight of the year was to visit Santa Claus at Gamages department store in Holborn. There was always a magical journey to reach him (knocked together with rotating bits of scenery and hand-rocked modes of transport) and when you arrived His Ho-Ho-Holiness would sit you on his knee and ask you if you’d been good all year. Gamages began with a tiny shop front in 1878, but by 1911 its catalogue ran to nine hundred pages. In the early 1970s it was replaced by offices and ‘exciting retail spaces.
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It went the way of other great London department stores—Swan & Edgar, Marshall & Snelgrove, Bourne & Hollingsworth, Derry & Toms and Dickins & Jones. The idea for this story came from something that actually happened to me.
Bryant & May and the Secret Santa
    ‘I blame Charles Dickens,’ said Arthur Bryant as he and his partner John May battled their way up the brass steps of the London Underground staircase and out into Oxford Street. ‘If you say you don’t like Christmas everyone calls you Scrooge.’ He fanned his walking stick from side to side in order to clear a path. It was snowing hard, but Oxford Circus was not picturesque. The great peristaltic circle had already turned to black slush beneath the tyres of buses and the boots of pedestrians. Regent Street was a different matter. Virtually nothing could kill its class. The Christmas lights shone through falling snowflakes along the length of John Nash’s curving terrace, but even this sight failed to impress Bryant.
    ‘You’re doing your duck face,’ said May. ‘What are you disapproving of now?’
    ‘Those Christmas lights.’ Bryant waggled his walking stick at them and nearly took someone’s eye out. ‘When I was a child Regent Street was filled with great chandeliers at this time of the year. These ones aren’t even proper lights, they’re bits of plastic advertising a Disney film.’
    May had to admit that his partner was right. Above them, Ben Stiller’s Photoshopped face peered down like an eerie, ageless Hollywood elf.
    ‘We never came to Oxford Street as kids,’ Bryant continued. ‘My brother and I used to head to Holborn with our mother to visit the Father Christmas at Gamages department store. I loved that place. You would get into a rocket ship or a paddle steamer and step off in Santa’s grotto. That building was a palace of childhood magic. I still can’t believe they pulled it down.’
    ‘Well, you’re going to see Santa now, aren’t you?’ May reminded him.
    ‘Yes, but it’s not the same when you feel like you’re a hundred years old. Plus, there’s a death involved this time, which sort of takes the sparkle off one’s Yuletide glow.’
    ‘Fair point,’ May conceded as Bryant tamped Old Holborn into his Lorenzo Spitfire and lit it.
    They passed a Salvation Army band playing carols. ‘ “Silent Night,” ’ Bryant noted. ‘I wish it bloody was. Look at these crowds. It’ll take us an age to reach Selfridges. We should have got off at Bond Street.’
    ‘Can you stop moaning?’ asked May. ‘I thought that as we were coming here we could pop into John Lewis and get my sister a kettle.’
    ‘Dear God, is that what she wants for Christmas?’ Bryant peeped over his tattered green scarf, shocked. ‘There’s not much seasonal spirit in that.’
    ‘It’s better than before. She used to email me Argos catalogue numbers,’ said May. ‘When I first opened her note I thought she’d written it in code.’
    A passing bus delivered them to the immense department store founded by Harry Selfridge, the shopkeeper who coined the phrase ‘The customer is always right.’ The snow was falling in plump white flakes, only to be transmuted into liquid coal underfoot. Bryant stamped and shook in the doorway like a wet dog. With his umbrella and stick he looked like a cross between an alpine climber and a troll.
    By the escalators, a store guide stood with a faraway look in his eye, as if he was imagining