The 'Short Present'

 

Our dad always played fair with my brother and myself when it came to gifts. If one of us was bought something like a toy car, the other received the equivalent. In the case of particularly desirable toys, such as the Dinky models from Gerry Anderson series, we’d be bought one each of the model in question, to circumvent any arguments over ownership. To this day, my old box of childhood toys contains a fair few duplicated models – Corgi’s deluxe Lincoln Continental of 1967, FAB1, Thunderbird 2 and Captain Scarlet’s SPV to name but a few.

Our birthdays are 27 days apart (28 days in a leap year). Not wanting either of us to feel left out on the other's birthday, our dad instigated a policy of buying what he called ‘short presents’ for whichever of us wasn’t celebrating his birthday, a kind of ‘runner-up’ gift, usually something like a book or a toy car. Whether this tradition came from his own family I can’t say, and I’ve never heard of it anywhere else: in fact, the closest equivalent I can find is the notion of an ‘unbirthday’ in Alice Through the Looking Glass, although we never used the expression ourselves.

To this day, I can still identify some of those so-called ‘short presents’ and my diaries of the early 70s list a few examples. In 1971, I was bought a copy of the recently published paperback novelisation of the Timeslip TV series; in 1973, a bar of chocolate; but for some reason, 1972 proved to be a bumper year – for my brother’s birthday, I received no fewer than four ‘short presents’: Corgi’s Basil Brush car, a UFO paperback book, a peanuts paperback (Here Comes Snoopy – the first I ever owned) and a plastic model of Dick Dastardly’s car. By comparison, when my own birthday rolled around a month later, the list of presents reads like a line-up from the Generation Game conveyor belt: three die-cast vehicles, a Viewmaster and slides, two Airfix kits, a box of After Eight mints, a ‘pop-a-point’ pencil, ‘magic letters’, gloves, a false beard, a ‘pit-stop set’ (whatever that was), two Biggles books and a set of felt-tipped pens. I can report that most of these items are still extant.

I don’t know when the tradition of the ‘short present’ got started: I can remember being bought a Matchbox die cast model of a Ford Mustang at my brother’s birthday back in 1966, and as late as 1975 my diary records that I was bought two Dr. Who paperbacks during a birthday trip to Birmingham, but these seem to have been the last examples of the tradition. The diary for 1976, despite being a long entry, makes no mention of my having received any presents. After all, we were old enough by now (14 and 12) to deal with not getting a present of our own on the other’s birthday.

I’m certain that other families with children have probably implemented similar policies, but our dad was uncommonly generous when it came to birthdays and Christmas and I’m sure we did a lot better than some of our contemporaries. One thing I’m sure of: nobody else has ever used the expression ‘short present’ in this context: as a search term it yields zero results on Google, so it was very likely a neologism coined by our dad. He had a kind of ‘meta-language’ of his own, an idiolect derived from bits he’d retained from reading stories to my brother and me, fragments of the Goon shows, puns and snatches of comedy he’d heard when working in cabaret. All families have their own unique sayings (one has only to tune into Liza Tarbuck’s Saturday evening show on Radio 2 to hear examples being shared) and this was one of ours. The etymology is hard to fathom, but it made perfect sense to us as children. ‘Short presents’ were special in a way that set them apart from the random toys we might have had bought for us on non-festive occasions, and that’s probably why I can still remember them after all this time.