"The Holly Tree" (Excerpt): Read by Chris Nayak

The wonderful actor Chris Nayak reads the from the First Branch of The Holly-Tree Inn - one of Dickens' rarer Christmas stories … 

Packed with self-deprecating humour, a fantastic snowy atmosphere, this a very pleasing festive narrative. 

Chris’ stage credits include King Duncan in Macbeth at the Globe this year, and previously the RSC and West End. His screen work includes Coronation Street and We Hunt Together …

So sit back an enjoy this opening  excerpt from The Holly Tree Inn 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Hi everyone, welcome to Christmas episode number five, which is a reading of the Holly Tree Inn, a festive story, the opening part of which I absolutely love, written some seven years after the five Christmas books, but as far as I'm concerned is definitely an honourable member of that set of stories and where the previous Christmas books were divided into days, quarters or chirps, this one is set down in branches packed with self-deprecating humour, a fantastic snowy atmosphere. This is a very pleasing first person narrative. I'm not going to say any more because it's so rare. I will let today's guest, the wonderful actor Chris Nyak, tell it to you. Chris's stage credits include King Duncan in Macbeth at the Globe earlier this year and previously the RSC and West End. His screen work includes Coronation Street and we Hunt Together. So sit back and enjoy this opening excerpt from the Holly Tree.

Speaker 2: 1:15

The Holly Tree First branch. Myself, I have kept one secret in the course of my life I am a bashful man. Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody ever did suppose it. But I am naturally a bashful man. This is the secret which I have never breathed until now. I might greatly move the reader by some account of the innumerable places I have not been to, the innumerable people I have not called upon or received, the innumerable social evasions I have been guilty of, solely because I am, by original constitution and character, a bashful man. But I will leave the reader unmoved and proceed with the object before me. That object is to give a plain account of my travels and discoveries in the Holly Tree Inn, in which place of good entertainment for man and beast, I was once snowed up.

Speaker 2: 2:29

It happened in the memorable year when I parted forever from Angela Leith, whom I was shortly to have married, on making the discovery that she preferred my bosom friend From our school days. I had freely admitted Edwin, in my own mind, to be far superior to myself, and though I was grievously wounded at heart, I felt the preference to be natural and tried to forgive them both. It was under these circumstances that I resolved to go to America on my way to the devil, communicating my discovery neither to Angela nor to Edwin, but resolving to write each of them an affecting letter conveying my blessing and forgiveness, which the steam tender for shore should carry to the post when I myself should be bound for the new world far beyond recall. I say, locking up my grief in my own breast and consoling myself as I could with the prospect of being generous, I quietly left all I held dear and started on the desolate journey I have mentioned. The dead winter time was in full dreariness when I left my chambers forever at five o'clock in the morning. I had shaved by candlelight, of course, and was miserably cold and experienced that general, all-pervading sensation of getting up to be hanged which I have usually found inseparable from untimely rising. Under such circumstances, how well I remember the forlorn aspect of Fleet Street when I came out of the temple the street lamps flickering in the gusty northeast wind, as if the very gas were contorted with cold. The white-topped houses, the bleak, star-lighted sky, the market people and other early stragglers trotting to circulate their almost frozen blood, the hospitable light and warmth of the few coffee shops and public houses that were open for such customers. The hard, dry, frosty rhyme with which the air was charged the wind had already beaten it into every crevice and which lashed my face like a steel whip. It wanted nine days to the end of the month and end of the year.

Speaker 2: 5:04

The post office packet for the United States was to depart from Liverpool, weather permitting, on the first of the ensuing month, and I had the intervening time on my hands. I had taken this into consideration and had resolved to make a visit to a certain spot, which I need not name, on the farther borders of Yorkshire. It was indeed to me by my having first seen Angela at a farmhouse in that place, and my melancholy was gratified by the idea of taking a wintery leave of it before my expatriation. I ought to explain that, to avoid being sought out before, my resolution should have been rendered irrevocable by being carried into full effect. I had written to Angela overnight in my usual manner, lamenting that urgent business, of which she should know all particulars by and by, took me unexpectedly away from her for a week or ten days. There was no Northern Railway at that time and in its place there were stagecoaches which I occasionally find myself, in common with some other people affecting to lament now, but which everybody dreaded as a very serious penance. Then I had secured the box seat on the fastest of these, and my business in Fleet Street was to get into a cab with my Portmanteau so to make the best of my way to the Peacock at Islington where I was to join this coach. But when one of our temple watchmen, who carried my Portmanteau into Fleet Street for me, told me about the huge blocks of ice that had, for some days past, been floating in the river, having closed up in the night and made a walk from the temple gardens over to the Surrey Shore, I began to ask myself the question whether the box seat would not be likely to put a sudden and frosty end to my unhappiness. I was heartbroken, it is true, and yet I was not quite so far gone as to wish to be frozen to death.

Speaker 2: 7:21

When I got up to the Peacock, where I found everybody drinking hot pearl in self-preservation, I asked if there were an inside seat to spare. I then discovered that, inside or out, I was the only passenger. This gave me a still livelier idea of the great inclemency of the weather. Since that coach always loaded particularly well, however, I took a little pearl, which I found uncommonly good, and got into the coach. When I was seated they built me up with straw to the waist and, conscious of making a rather ridiculous appearance, I began my journey.

Speaker 2: 8:04

It was still dark when we left the Peacock For a little while. Pale, uncertain ghosts of houses and trees appeared and vanished. And then it was hard black, frozen day. People were lighting their fires, smoke was mounting straight up high into the rarefied air and we were rattling for Highgate Archway over the hardest ground I have ever heard the ring of iron shoes on. As we got into the country, everything seemed to have grown old and grey the roads, the trees, thatched, roofs of cottages and homesteads, the ricks in farmer's yards. Outdoor work was abandoned, horse troughs at Rose Side Inns were frozen hard, no stragglers lounged about, doors were closed, shut Little Turnpike houses had blazing fires inside and children even Turnpike people have children and seem to like them rubbed the frost from the little panes of glass with their chubby arms that their bright eyes might catch a glimpse of the solitary coach going by.

Speaker 2: 9:16

I don't know when the snow began to set in, as I know that we were changing horses somewhere when I heard the guard remark that old lidi up in the sky was picking her gaze pretty hard today. Then, indeed, I found the white down falling fast and thick. The lonely day wore on and I dozed it out as a lonely traveller does. I was warm and valiant after eating and drinking, particularly after dinner, cold and depressed. At all other times I was always bewildered as to time and place and always more or less out of my senses. The coach and horses seemed to execute in chorus old langzine, without a moment's intermission. They kept the time in tune with the greatest regularity and rose into the swell at the beginning of the refrain with the precision that worried me to death. While we changed horses, the guard and coachman went stomping up and down the road, printing off their shoes in the snow, and poured so much liquid consolation into themselves, without being any the worse for it, that I began to confound them, as it darkened again with two eyes.