Snap-Dragons; Old Father Christmas — Edition Insights

The Rhythm of Contradiction

In “Snap-Dragons,” Ewing builds the entire opening around a single, extended example of the Skratdjs’ mutual corrections. The passage is structured like a script: Mrs Skratdj makes a remark about the weather, and Mr Skratdj interjects with a precise time (“A quarter past eleven, my dear”) and a claim about barometric pressure. She parries by recalling his own words; he counters with a memory lapse about a dinner hour. The effect is both comic and exhausting, and Ewing underlines it with recurring phrases: “my dear,” “my love,” “pardon me.” The narrator’s tone is dryly observational, noting that the couple’s contradictions are “mutually understood and allowed for in private” but “most trying to the by-standers in public.” This early passage establishes a narrative voice that is more interested in pattern than in plot, and it sets up a domestic world where language is a battleground.

A First-Person Voice of Longing

“Old Father Christmas” is narrated by an old man recalling his childhood, and Ewing gives him a distinct, colloquial idiom. He uses interjections like “Grumph!” and addresses the listener directly (“You’re laughing now, little master, are you?”). His sentences are long and associative, moving from the desire to be a sailor to memories of sailing a pigsty-door on a duck-pond, then to coaching fantasies with a whip and gloves. The voice is wistful but unsentimental: he notes that drowning is “the death for a sailor” and that he has given “every navigable sea in the known world a chance.” The shell given by Kitty the servant becomes a recurring motif—a physical object that connects him to the sea he has never seen. Ewing uses this object to anchor the narrator’s abstract longing in a concrete, sensory detail: “when you put it to your ear you could hear the roaring of the sea.”

Shifts in Pace and Perspective

The two stories differ markedly in narrative pace. “Snap-Dragons” moves slowly, dwelling on the back-and-forth of dialogue and the narrator’s analytical asides. The Skratdj dinner scene is almost static, a single moment stretched into a set piece. In contrast, “Old Father Christmas” accelerates through a series of memories: the whip and gloves, the shell, the birthday bonfire with eight potatoes and eight-pennyworth of crackers. The narrator’s voice jumps from one recollection to another, linked by phrases like “And, speaking of Dick and the straw reminds me…” This associative structure creates a sense of a mind moving freely through time. Ewing also shifts from third-person omniscient in the first story to first-person retrospective in the second, a change that alters the reader’s distance from the events. The Skratdj family is observed from outside; the old man’s childhood is felt from within.

Readers may find it useful to attend to the way Ewing uses repetition and variation across the two tales. The Skratdjs’ contradictions are a form of repetition without resolution; the old man’s memories circle back to the same objects and desires. Both stories are built around small, domestic rituals—a dinner party, a birthday—that become occasions for exploring how people narrate their own lives. The shell, the whip, the potatoes: these are not symbols but things that carry emotional weight through the care with which they are described.

Reading Snap-Dragons, I lingered on the Skratdjs’ affectionate bickering, how contradiction can be its own clumsy love. It reminded me of the boys in The Arrival of Jimpson, and Other Stories for Boys about Boys — Text and Context, where rough edges hide softer yearnings. Odd, how these old stories share that quiet ache beneath the noise.