A Christmas Cracker: The only festive romance to curl up with this Christmas!

‘Do you miss him, dear?’ she asked suddenly, with her acute, bright-eyed gaze.

‘No, not at all,’ I replied, surprised into frankness. ‘I think I must have been in love with a mirage. Perhaps we both were, because he can’t have known me, or he’d have realised I was telling the truth about the fraud. And he sent my cat to a rescue centre without telling me.’

‘That was not an act of great kindness, but he probably meant it for the best.’

‘Yes: his best. I’m sure Pye thought it was a cat prison and he was being punished for something, but I’ve got him back now, that’s the main thing,’ I said. ‘We can both have a fresh start together.’

‘Once you’ve found your bearings, you can register him at the vet’s practice in Great Mumming – turn left onto the road at the bottom of the hill. You already know the way to Little Mumming, but you can get to it by means of a track behind the factory, too, if you don’t mind a bit of a climb.’

She led the way into the main building, which had ‘Friendship Mill’ carved into the stone over the entrance, with, below it, a faded royal-purple board proclaiming, in worn gilt lettering, ‘Marwood’s Magical Crackers’.

Inside was one of those large, anonymous lobbies, with washroom facilities, a coffee table and worn tweed-effect chairs. An office was partitioned off from it with glass windows, like an aquarium for secretary fish. It was in darkness today: no piscine inhabitants lurked in its depths.

‘Arlene, Dorrie Bird’s daughter, works part-time in the office and the rest of the week at the bank in Great Mumming, but this isn’t one of her days,’ Mercy explained, pushing open double doors at the far end of the lobby with a flourish. ‘And here we are: the cracker factory!’

The interior was surprisingly large and well-lit, both by a series of long windows down one side and a double row of large suspended green-shaded lights. A staircase ran away to the right to a mezzanine floor.

Only one side of the space seemed to be in use and most of the workforce were seated there at benches. They looked up curiously as we entered.

‘Hello, everyone, I’ve come to show Tabby, my new assistant, around,’ called out Mercy. ‘Do carry on and I’ll introduce you individually as we get to you.’

They continued to suspend operations and stare, but Mercy didn’t seem to notice, just led me across to a slender black lady with striking short silver hair. She had on a flowing dress in a bright yellow daisy pattern, an Arran cardigan with big wooden buttons and red leather clogs. My initial impression that she looked as serious and stately as an elderly Maya Angelou was dispelled the moment she spoke.

‘Pleased to meet you, luv,’ she said in a strong Liverpool accent along with a puckish grin. ‘My daughter, Arlene, will be, too. She works in the office a couple of mornings a week, but she won’t be in till tomorrow.’

‘I’ll look forward to meeting her then,’ I said. She was sitting at one of a row of workstations, with drawers and trays at the back, and a small unit on casters next to her.

‘We’ve got everything we need to make the crackers right to hand,’ she explained. ‘We lay out the novelties ready, according to what kind it is, though we only produce two different ones now, unless we get a special order.’

‘Do you all make the complete crackers from start to finish?’ I asked. ‘I thought it might be sort of an assembly line, with each of you doing different parts.’

‘We can all make them, but Bradley and Phil do other jobs, too. Brad makes sure each workstation is stocked with the right paper, jokes, novelties, hats and decorations, while Phil rolls and glues the central tubes and gets the snaps out of the storeroom as needed.’

‘Don’t you need those to hand, too?’

‘Yes, but you don’t want a lot of them together, because they’re a fire hazard,’ she said. ‘They’re in a reinforced fireproof bin in the back room.’

‘Silver fulminate,’ said Mercy. ‘When the snap is pulled apart, the friction makes the small explosive sound.’

‘Joy and Lillian usually pack the crackers in the display boxes and the boys carton them up for delivery. But as I say, if we’re busy we can all do anything.’

It didn’t look as if they’d been busy in a very long time but it did remind me very much of Santa’s workshop, what with the half-open drawers and trays full of novelties, spools of bright ribbon and half-made colourful crackers in crinkled crepe paper.

As I watched, one of the other women rolled a tartan-edged green paper rectangle round the central tube, secured it with a dab of glue and dexterously gathered and tied off the ends with red ribbon.

‘Them glue guns we got last year were good, once we got the hang of them,’ Dorrie said. ‘That was our Arlene’s idea.’

‘Brilliant,’ Mercy said. ‘I’m sure she and Tabby will come up with all kinds of other things too, once they put their heads together.’

She introduced me to the others one by one, who eyed me with a wary speculation that I recognised from prison. I only hoped I wasn’t permanently wearing the same expression.

Bradley was a pale, slender man with thin, pepper-and-salt hair, freckles and watery grey eyes behind severe glasses. He seemed morose and didn’t look directly at me when he shook hands, barely touching my fingertips before dropping them.

Phil, on the other hand, was a burly, cheerful, bald-headed man with no discernible neck, and tattoos up both arms. The mermaids would have looked at home in the aquarium office.

The other two women were totally unlike each other. Lillian’s improbably bronze curls were lacquered into an upswept nest and she had outlined her lips – or at least where she thought they should be – in a dark pencil before sloppily filling in the generous shape like a child who had trouble staying between the lines in a colouring book.

Joy, who I remembered had passed herself off as a member of the upper classes at hotels and then absconded without paying, was small, quiet, well-spoken and pleasant. The word that best described her was grey: grey hair, grey clothes and grey eyes.

I wanted to linger over the dusty racks of card and crepe, old-fashioned paper scraps of Santas and cheeky cherubs; the foil stickers, tinsel edging and curling festoons of ribbon.

It all looked a lot more exciting than the finished boxes, which were, it has to be said, rather cheap and tacky-looking and old-fashioned in a bad, not retro, way.

‘There are three large storage rooms here at the back,’ Mercy said, remorselessly detaching me from a box of old scraps I was rummaging in and urging me on. ‘Apart from the first one, which has the doors to the loading area at the back, I can’t say they’re really used any more, and goodness knows what’s in them. They could do with a good clear-out.’

She switched on a dim light, revealing a trio of adjoining rooms running right across the back of the building, full of racks and shelves jam-packed with shapes so furred with dust it was impossible to see what they were.

‘We’ve always kept a few boxes of each kind of cracker we’ve produced – there were lots of varieties at one time. But now we only have two, Happy Family crackers and the Marwood’s Magical ones. The latter have little harmless jokes and tricks in them.’

‘Mmm …’ I said non-committally, because the ones I’d seen out in the workshop hadn’t looked terribly exciting.

‘So, that’s the extent of the operation now,’ Mercy said finally, taking me out of the further room onto the mill floor again, though this area under the mezzanine level was entirely empty.

We looked into the extensive attached outbuildings, the rooms bare except from a sifting of soft dust and the occasional packing case, apart from one that was fitted out as a sort of staff room, with a kettle, small fridge and more of the tweedy armchairs like the ones in the reception area. One of the side doors was fitted with a new-looking cat-flap.

‘I don’t know where the cats have gone,’ Mercy said, but the two resident moggies silently appeared as we began to retrace our steps into the mill.

‘This is Ginger, obviously,’ she said, stooping to stroke them, ‘and here’s Bing. Lillian feeds them, because she’s very fond of cats.’

The cats, perhaps bored and in need of a diversion, trailed us as we said our goodbyes and headed back towards the house … only to stop dead when we got to the bridge and they spotted the large, dark and menacing form of Pye, still sitting on the far end like a monstrous gargoyle, awaiting our return.

There was a confrontation of silent stares. With his strange, odd-coloured eyes, Pye did staring very well. It seemed to unnerve the other two, at any rate, but the final straw came when he slowly rose, puffed himself out hugely and began a slow advance.

They backed away, one paw at a time … then suddenly, their nerve broke and they turned and fled back towards the mill.

‘You big bully,’ I chided him, but he just made his strange ‘Pfft!’ noise and stalked regally past me towards home.

‘Funny old pussycat,’ Mercy said to him fondly. Then she added, with her usual sunny optimism, ‘I’m sure they will all soon be the best of friends! Come along: I think we’ve earned our lunch.’

Time had flown by and suddenly I realised what the strange feeling in my stomach was: hunger!

Chapter 12: Christmas Lists (#ulink_bf905124-2f63-5b09-ad10-fce69b74481f)

Q: What do you get if you eat Christmas decorations?

A: Tinselitis!

Mercy had a few calls to make and emails to send and told me to help myself to whatever I fancied for lunch in the kitchen and she would make herself something when she’d finished.