‘It’s the Reaction’ by Mollie-Panter Downes

Back in the days of WW2, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote stories featuring ordinary British people – mostly women – trying to cope with the day-to-day realities of life on the Home Front. Panter-Downes’ style – understated, perceptive and minutely observed – makes for a subtly powerful effect. She is particularly adept at capturing the range of emotions experienced by her characters, from loneliness and longing to fear and self-pity. In this, my favourite of her stories, a lonely young woman is buoyed by the camaraderie of war when she finally gets to know her neighbours as they shelter together during the Blitz. However, once the sequence of air raids is over, life in Miss Birch’s apartment block reverts to normal – and when she tries to rekindle her new friendships, Miss Birch soon discovers the fickle nature of relationships, even in times of hardship and war.

First published in The New Yorker, 1943, available to subscribers here. Collected in Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, Persephone 1999

‘Sally Bowles’ by Christopher Isherwood

Undoubtedly the standout piece from Isherwood’s novel in short stories, Goodbye to Berlin, this story features Sally Bowles, a young English girl who has come to Berlin in the hope of finding work as a singer/actress. By the time she meets Christopher, Sally is just about scraping a living, singing (quite badly) at one of the city’s bars. Nevertheless, she makes quite an impression on Christopher, dressed as she is in black silk “with a small cape over her shoulders and a little cap like a page-boy’s stuck jauntily on one side of her head”.Fairly soon after their first meeting, Sally invites Christopher to tea at her lodgings, a gloomy semi-furnished place presided over by a rather eccentric old matron. Before long the pair strike up a somewhat unlikely friendship, spending time with one another on a fairly regular basis – much to the delight of Christopher’s landlady, Frl. Schroeder, who imagines Sally as a possible partner for her favourite boarder. It’s an utterly charming story, a wonderful tribute to a provocative character from Isherwood’s past.

First published by the Hogarth Press in 1937, and then in Goodbye to Berlin, The Hogarth Press, 1939 and The Berlin Novels, both currently available from Vintage

‘The Velvet Dress’ by Silvina Ocampo, translated by Daniel Balderston

I am very grateful to NYRB Classics for introducing me to the stories of Silvina Ocampo, an Argentine writer from the mid-20th century. There is a childlike sense of mischief and wickedness which runs through several of Ocampo’s pieces, especially those from the 1950s and ‘60s. This particular story features a woman who is having a dress made-to-measure, a velvet gown featuring a dragon motif embroidered with sequins. In writing this tale, Ocampo is playing with the dual nature of velvet, a fabric that feels smooth when rubbed one way and rough the other, something that has the power to repel as well as attract. Without wishing to give too much away, this brief but highly effective tale takes a rather sinister turn as it moves towards its conclusion. Perfect reading for Halloween or a stormy night in the middle of winter.

First published in The Fury, 1959. Collected in Thus Were Their Faces, New York Review Books 2015.

‘The Lumber Room’ by Saki

Several of Saki’s stories feature mischievous children rebelling against disagreeable, strait-laced guardians. ‘The Lumber Room’ is a prime example of this, as young Nicholas must remain at home while the rest of the children in the family are treated to a day out. It is his punishment for an earlier misdemeanour at the breakfast table, one involving a frog and a basin of ‘wholesome bread-and-milk’. At an early stage in the story, Saki paints a revealing portrait of Nicholas’s rather draconian aunt, the woman in charge of the household – in reality, however, she is only the boy’s ‘aunt-by-assertion’. Convinced that young Nicholas will try to sneak off to the prized gooseberry patch while his cousins and brother are away, the aunt maintains a close watch on the garden in an attempt to spoil the boy’s fun. However, unbeknownst to the aunt, Nicholas has other plans for the day – he wishes to gain entry to the mysterious lumber room, a place generally kept under strict lock and key, only to be accessed by the most privileged members of the household. This is a very effective story in which the knowing child enjoys a moment of triumph over his loathsome guardian.

First published in the Morning Post. Collected in Beasts and Super-Beasts, John Lane 1914, and Complete Short Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000. Available variously online, including here

‘Sleep It Off Lady’ by Jean Rhys

A superb story from one of my favourite writers, a woman who understood the loneliness and alienation of life as an outsider. The story – one of Rhys’ last – focuses on Miss Verney, an elderly lady who lives on her own in a cottage in the country. Her garden is dominated by the presence of a large iron shed, a looming presence that seems likely to outlast her. Add to this the problem of rats, and life for Miss Verney is beginning to seem hopeless. It’s a sobering piece, dealing as it does with the challenges of ageing, isolation and a feeling of helplessness. There is a sense that the Miss Verneys of this world have been abandoned by society, left to fester away without care or support. By the time it was first published in 1976, Rhys was in her mid-eighties and only a few years away from death herself, a fact that adds an extra note of poignancy to the story.

First published in Sleep It Off Lady, André Deutsch, 1976. Collected in The Collected Short Stories, Penguin Classics 2017

‘Last Night’ by James Salter

I love this author’s talent for conveying a mood, his ability to capture the emotional intensity of a moment in such graceful prose, irrespective of the context. Walter’s wife, Marit, is terminally ill with cancer. Unable to tolerate the pain any longer, Marit has asked Walter to hasten her death, a wish we assume he has agreed to carry out even though we are not privy to any of their earlier discussions. The story hinges on Marit and Walter’s last night together. Their final supper has ended, the lethal injection lies ready and waiting in the fridge, and the appointed time is approaching. We think we know how this story will unfold, how both of these individuals deserve our sympathies as they confront the nature of Marit’s mortality; but just when we least expect it, Salter wrongfoots us in the most surprising of ways, a move that prompts us to question our assumptions about values, morals, intentions and motives. This is a highly memorable story, one with the potential to haunt the reader for some considerable time.

First published in The New Yorker. Collected in Last Night, Alfred A. Knopf 2005/Picador, 2007. It is available to read online here

‘Rasputin’ by Teffi/Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, translated by Anne Marie Jackson

Like Silvina Ocampo, the Russian writer, Teffi, is another relatively recent discovery for me. During her literary career Teffi wrote satirical articles and plays, but by the age of forty she was publishing mostly short stories. In 1919, in the midst of the Russian Civil War, Teffi left Russia for Europe, eventually settling in Paris where she became a prominent figure in the émigré literary circles. Rasputinis one of Teffi’s most memorable pieces, a piercing account of her personal encounters with this legendary figure. While Rasputin is immediately drawn to Teffi, the feeling is far for mutual. As a consequence, the great mystic simply cannot understand why Teffi fails to respond to his charms – he is not accustomed to meeting such resistance from anyone, let alone a woman. For her part, Teffi detects something profoundly unpleasant and chilling about the atmosphere surrounding Rasputin: ‘the grovelling, the collective hysteria – and at the same time the machinations of something dark, something very dark beyond our knowledge.’ There is the sense that one could quite easily fall under his hypnotic spell and never be able to break free from it.

Collected in Subtly Worded, Pushkin Press 2014

‘Christmas at Thompson Hall’ by Anthony Trollope

A classic story of mix-ups and confusions shot through with gentle humour. Having grown accustomed to spending their winters in the South of France, Mr and Mrs Brown are travelling back to England for a family gathering at Thompson Hall. Mrs Brown’s younger sister is to be married, and this will be the couple’s first opportunity to meet the girl’s fiancé in person. With her fondness for the traditions of the season, Mrs Brown is eager to get to the Hall in time for Christmas Eve. Her husband, however, seems reluctant to make the trip for fear of aggravating his weak chest and throat, a condition which causes the couple to break their journey to spend the night in Paris. When his wife asks him if there is anything she can do to relieve his suffering, Mr Brown identifies just the thing – the application of a mustard compress to the throat is sure to be of great help. (As it turns out, Mr B is something of a hypochondriac.) What follows is a hilarious sequence of white lies, misunderstandings and coincidences, culminating in a most embarrassing predicament for Mrs Brown. To say any more might spoil the fun.

First published in The Graphic. Collected in Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices and Other Stories, 1882. Also collected in Christmas at Thompson Hall and Other Christmas Stories, Penguin Books 2014

‘The Springs of Affection’ by Maeve Brennan

I’m breaking the rules a little here by highlighting a collection of linked stories united by virtue of their setting, a modest terraced house in the Ranelagh suburb of Dublin – a house featuring the same walled garden with a laburnum tree, the same three steps down to the kitchen, and the same linoleum on the bedroom floor. The autobiographical pieces on Brennan’s childhood which open the collection are followed by a series of stories on the Derdons, a middle-aged couple whose marriage is characterised by an intense emotional distance, something that seems to have developed over several years. Brennan is particularly insightful on the small cruelties of human nature, the tricks we play on one another to score minor victories for the pettiest of reasons. If I had to single out one story, it would be the titular piece featuring Min, the embittered twin sister of the third occupant of the house, Martin Derdon. Min has spent most of her adult life resenting her sister-in-law, Delia, for taking Martin away from his family after their wedding. Now that both Martin and Delia are dead, the elderly Min is ensconced her flat in Wexford where she can wallow in a perverse kind of satisfaction fuelled by jealousy and bitterness, surrounded as she is by the couple’s furniture and former possessions. It’s a brilliant story, shot through with layers of insight and meaning.

First published in The New Yorker. Collected in The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin, Mariner Books 1998. It is available to read online here.

‘Christmas Not Just Once a Year’, by Heinrich Böll

This is my favourite festive story, a satire on post-war hypocrisies, and one of Heinrich Böll’s more absurd fictions, an illustration of the weird and dysfunctional ways in which families operate at Christmas- (or any) time.

It concerns a family much disturbed by the psychological breakdown of their wife and mother, the narrator’s Aunt Milla. Each year, this well-do-do, middle-class family prepares for Christmas in the usual fashion, except with the onset of peace and economic recovery they can celebrate as they did in the pre-war years: lavish tree decorations, candies and the familiar, familial singing of carols by the tree.

But that this year, on Candlemas Eve, when Milla’s son attempts to take the decorations down, she begins to scream: an impossible caterwauling without cease, one that can only be pacified if the family leaves the decorations up and by the ludicrous repetition of the Christmas traditions, every single evening, which includes the unseasonal spectacle of the recitation of the lyrics, “O Christmas Tree!” and “…in winter too, when snowflakes fall…” in the middle of June.

Aunt Milla is cocooned within the delusion that every day is Christmas Eve and her family are forced to collude in the delusion. Seasonal treats are prepared and eaten daily. Christmas trees are gone through at an alarming rate. Doctors and psychologists are of no use. The entire family, along with the local priest, are press-ganged into maintaining the façade to the detriment of their personal and moral degradation. At one point, paid actors are brought in to stand in for individuals members of the family who have bowed out.

It’s not the most heart-warming or traditional of Christmas fictions, but in a field of necessary, well-meaning tales offering cheer, optimism and good-will to et cetera… it stands out: a story that is comical and sad, about a clan so consumed by their aunt’s well-being they forfeit their own, and the hellish prospect of a family Christmas that never ends. If nothing else it may put some readers’ own and personal family horrors into perspective.

First broadcast – as ‘Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit’ in 1951 – and published in a collection with the same title in 1952.

Chosen by JL Bogenschneider, who is a writer of short fiction, with recent work published in The Island Review, Ellipsis Zine, Burning House Press and theYork Literary Review.

‘Christians Singing’ by William Saroyan

“Boy, I’ve got plenty to say. You should have heard those Christians singing.” William Saroyan infiltrated my bookshelves via an anthology I’d purchased because it included work by another now-neglected author. Oh, the unexpected rewards of completism. Leafing through the book, I found ‘Christians Singing’: four wondrous pages, narrated in the voice quoted above. The story is not explicitly set at Christmas time; maybe it’s not, maybe it doesn’t matter. The unabashedly sentimental point is that the singers in question are out making their annual attempt to raise donations, singing songs about walking with Jesus and the like. “I don’t want to convert anybody to anything,” the narrator assures you. “Boy,” though, he sure feels bad for lying to the Christian girl who comes to his door about being broke. “I had seventy-eight cents on the table upstairs in my room.” Scrooge in miniature. Saroyan’s gift to you.

First published in Inhale and Exhale, Random House, 1936. Collected in Best Stories of William Saroyan, Faber & Faber, 1945

Chosen by Michael Caines. Michael works at the Times Literary Supplement and is founding editor of the Brixton Review of Books. He is also the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013) and the editor of a TLS bicentennial celebration of Jane Austen.

You can read Michael’s own Personal Anthology here

‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ by Dylan Thomas

As rich and filling as a thick slice of plum pudding, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ reminds me of all the Christmases I never had as a child (my parents had no time for that sort of thing), and of all the other Christmases I’ve missed as a grown-up through work or travel or simply being alone, by choice or necessity. I first read it as a teenager at a time when I had a particular passion for Thomas’s prose. Most of his poetry left me cold back then, and still does, but I loved Under Milk Wood, the short stories, the unfinished novel Adventures in the Skin Trade and the letters. Everyone should read the letters.

‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ is hardly a story at all, more a shrewdly calculated exercise in nostalgia. A cynic may dislike the author’s ingratiating approach, but I’m no cynic and find it irresistible. There’s a boozy sentimentality underlying it all, and what could be more appropriate at this time of the year? Whenever I read it to myself, or read it to others (avoiding any attempt at a Welsh accent), I am always reminded of those densely-populated Giles cartoons in the Daily Express (once a great newspaper) showing a crowded family kitchen at Christmas time, full of steaming saucepans and bickering kiddywinks, with Mum serenely rolling pastry and Dad asleep with a newspaper spread over his face, the terrifying Grandma tippling sherry in her armchair, the dog chasing the cat under the table, the snow falling outside. An image of warm familial contentment – tolerant, cluttered, secure and chaotic. Christmases were never like this, but it’s a consolation to imagine that they could have been, at least for the Thomases of Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea.

The paragraphs are jam-packed with vividly-rendered upper-cased Presents: the Useful (home-knitted clothes mostly but including, in a favourite phrase, “books that told me everything about the wasp, except why”) and the Useless (“Bags of moist and many-coloured jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor’s cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult”). The house is likewise packed with significant upper-cased Uncles and Aunts (“Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush”). There’s plenty of Just William-style mischief as the young Dylan and his pals Jim and Dan and Jack roam the town and the beach with their sweet cigarettes and dog-whistles. A snow-covered Swansea plays host to a surreal menagerie of creatures: cats, dogs, reindeers, wolves, bears, sloths, camels, a zebra, hippos and a clock-work mouse (which frightens Aunt Bessie, twice). There are also trolls and ghosts and, in a terrifying moment, “a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door”.

Perhaps you have no appetite for plum pudding and I’ll admit that, for the rest of the year, my own tastes incline to the austere. But this, believe me, is a quarter of an hour well spent and a perfect accompaniment to egg-nog. I expect you’ll enjoy it.

PS I have a theory that when writing the dialogue in the story Thomas was influenced by the Robert Graves poem ‘Welsh Incident’ (1929). Here’s a recording of Thomas reading it very badly, and here’s Richard Burton reading it brilliantly. See what you make of them both.

First published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1950, including material from a radio broadcast written for the BBC in 1945, and a 1947 essay for Picture Post. Currently published by Orion, 2006. Available online here

Chosen by David Collard. David is a writer and researcher based in London. His most recent book is About a Girl (CB editions). He contributes to the forthcoming anthology We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books, March 2019) and is currently working on a group biography of London writers in the 1970s.

Read David’s previous contributions to A Personal Anthology here

‘Bath Time’ by Jenny Diski

Written in Diski’s imitable style, ‘Bath Time’ offsets realism and desire. The story is a lesson in reduction, distilling human existence into a single dream, a woman’s longing for the perfect bath. ‘Bath Time’ scratches at the edge of absurdity whilst staying close to gritty, visceral details: Imperial Leather, greyish vinyl tiles, a “slow stream of immersion heated water.” A life is told through time in encapsulated hot water: embryonic baths, Dettol disinfectant childhood baths, a kaleidoscope bath tripping on LSD… Finally, the story leads us to a much-awaited Christmas Eve and the prospect of a present on the 25th, the ultimate, empyrean bath, the fulfillment the woman’s “greatest ambition.”

When I first read ‘Bath Time’, as a twenty-year old Drama student, I loved the story so much it inspired my final degree show. My play about women, bathrooms, and metamorphosing bodies was a reflection of Diski’s world. When the lights went up, three women occupied a real pink bathroom suite: a pale rose toilet, curved sink, and a bath filled to the brim with tiny, bright white polystyrene balls. As the main character lay in the ‘water’, describing scrubbing raw her teenage skin, the tiny balls poured over the edge of the bath in mounds, which became waves, spilling across the stage floor. The little white bubbles, perfect spheres, dropped off the brink of the stage in a curtain like a waterfall, falling into the orchestra pit.

First published in Sacred Space, edited by Marsha Lowe, Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Collected in The Vanishing Princess, Ecco reissued 2017

Chosen by Susanna Crossman. Susanna is an Anglo-French writer and co-author of the French novel, L’Hôpital, Le dessous des Cartes(LEH, 2015). Her fiction has been short-listed for the Bristol Prize and Glimmertrain. More at: https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com @crossmansusanna

‘The Gift of the Magi’ by O Henry

I first heard this story when I was about eight and a teacher read it during an assembly, and I’ve often thought of it since, maybe because I’m slightly obsessed with the psychology of presents. Why we give them, how we choose them, and how best to receive them, for better and worse… the whole thing is a fascinating minefield, especially since a present usually says much more about the giver’s perception than the receiver’s desires. This story is no different, and while the hook is the tragedy of the ironic resolution, it is at the same time infused with a huge expression of mutual love – surely the ultimate point of all gifts anyway.

First published in The New York Sunday World, December 1905. Widely republished, including here online

Chosen by Alice Furse. Alice works at Four Communications and is the author of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.