Best Christmas: Winter, England, 1964

When I think about the best Christmas present I ever received, I’m a little surprised at the force of that particular memory and the pleasure it still brings me.

The gift did not come from anyone I had a special attachment to. It wasn’t made by hand, and it was not one-of-a-kind. There was nothing spiritual about it. It was not a book.

The year was 1964. I was 14 years old. The place was Mickleham, Surrey, England. I was a student at a bleak red-brick boarding school in the south of England. Believe me, England can be very cold in the winter, damp and raw. And as I remember it, the winter of 1964 was particularly cold.

It wasn’t just my imagination, either. The school was newly created and no one, from the headmaster to the cook, had much money. The Victorian mansion we all lived in housed 120 students, boys and girls ages 8 to 18. Central heating was a concept that had not yet reached that part of England.

It was a winter of stark deprivation, and the future did not look promising. My parents had recently gotten divorced, and my mother fled to England. That’s how I ended up at this boarding school. But she died six months earlier, leaving me stranded physically and emotionally.

One day the school took us on an outing. We visited a makeup factory in a nearby town. I remember looking at huge vats of what would become face makeup and feeling beyond depressed. This was my future? Working in a makeup factory?

Later, I would return to the United States and live with my maternal grandparents, but I couldn’t absolutely predict this happy outcome at the time. I was worried, hungry, and cold. I was living in a kind of limbo with my friends, many of whom also seem to have traumatic family lives.

There was Maria who came from Venezuela. Her parents thought she would benefit from a British schooling. Anne grew up on Malta. Her father was an officer in the British Navy. Annette had a mother who lived in Holland and a father who lived in England. Two students were from what was then called Persia, and two boys were from Thailand.

We arrived at the school, sent by well-meaning parents, who might have been impressed by the fact it was a Kurt Hahn school, meaning that its philosophy emphasized the need for strong minds and strong bodies. Another Hahn school was Gordonstoun in Scotland, which King Charles attended, unhappily, when he was a boy.

Although the education we received was dreadful—most of the teachers seemed to be social rejects—we were trained to be physically fit. Each morning, we put on white tops and shorts and ran around the building, rain or shine, followed by a cold shower.

So, Maria, Anne, Annette, and I stuck together and formed fast friendships to counteract our fear of the future. We wore gray uniforms in the mornings: gray corduroy skirts, sweaters, blouses, stockings. We wore white uniforms when we played field hockey on the foggy grounds behind the school. In the evenings our gray uniforms were brightened by the addition of green ties and green blazers.

The food we ate was either boiled or fried. Boiled potatoes, mushy vegetables, burnt porridge. Fried bread, dry fish, greasy meat.

As I think back on it now, I was a pretty game kid. I came from a middle-class background. At home, we ate dinner by candlelight in a formal dining room. I adapted well to my new circumstances.

But the thing that bothered me the most about this boarding school life was not the bad food nor the indifferent education, but the seeping cold.

I developed chilblains on my hands and feet, itchy skin sores because of exposure to cold, which I had previously only read about in novels set during the Civil War.

It seemed to me that we were only warm when we were asleep in our narrow cots. And I never got enough sleep. The awakening gong would clang in the downstairs hall hours before I was ready to get up in the cold and dark and go for a morning run.

One day in early December, I received a box in the mail from a fancy department store in Chicago. Inside was a beautifully wrapped package in glittering paper with a golden ribbon and bow.

I ran upstairs to my dormitory where, surrounded by my girlfriends, I unwrapped the box to find a secondary bed of white tissue paper sealed with gold stickers.

I should say this gift came from my father’s second wife, a woman I’d never meet because they were divorced after a few short months of marriage.

“Oooh,” we cried as the tissue paper fell away, revealing a black and gold bottle of spray perfume. Chanel No. 5. This was the last word in sophistication and elegance.

When I saw that perfume and sprayed the scent in the room, I knew that I had a future. I would grow up and fall in love and someday I would wear Chanel No. 5 for someone wonderful.

But that wasn’t all. The perfume was nestled on a bed of soft pink fabric, which turned out to be a full-length nightgown, hand-embroidered with white lace at the collar and cuffs.

“Oooh,” we said. It was the most beautiful and warmest nightgown I had ever seen, fabulously out of place in a dorm full of utilitarian flannel pajamas. When I looked at the nightgown, I knew I had a future. Someday I’d have a big closet and I’d wear beautiful clothes and would never again wear gray corduroy.

So, what’s in a gift? Especially an expensive, materialistic gift from a virtual stranger? In this case, everything. It gave me hope.

This Christmas, let yourself go on a splurge if you know a teenager who might be worried, confused, or even frightened about the future.

It could become a lifelong memory.