A post for Christmas
This is both my belated-Solstice and early-Christmas post, wishing you all warmth, light and happiness of the season.
From Antonia Forest's End of Term, which has the most magical description of the school's Nativity play being performed in the town's Minster. I am no longer a Christian, but I can't read this description of the performance of the play without shivers going down my spine.
[The background is that various of the book's principal and minor characters are having to do last-minute role swaps in the play, because of people being ill/running away and classic school-story shenanigans; the two viewpoint characters here are two of the Nativity angels - but none of that really matters at this point: what I love about these extracts is their atmosphere, the combination of genuine spiritual feeling, the sympathetic-magic of theatre, and the imagery of darkness and light...]
We begin backstage in the Minster cloisters.
~~~
It had stopped snowing. Untrodden whiteness covered the cloister garth, making a blanched shining in the dusk. On the far side, the Minster's bulk heaved up against the sky, roofs and towers, pinnacles and gargoyles, all smoothed and blobbed with snow. The silence was absolute.
The turmoil and disaster of the evening fell away. There was only this enchantment of the snow guarding their two hours' traffic of the stage...
Along the way they had come, footsteps hurried also. But it wasn't the rest of the Choir; a flustered young woman blundered in on them with an assortment of small children, two and two, at her heels, said, 'Oh dear, now we're wrong again,' and made as if to shoo the children out again...
[One of the five-year-old class, a 'gap-toothed infant', starts gazing at one of the angel characters:]
He was staring unblinkingly at Miranda.
With the gold cardboard circle on the back of her head, and her stern vivid face, she really did look, thought the surprised Nicola, rather like one of the carved angels in the reredos. With renewed thanks for not being thrown out into the snow, the young mistress formed the children into line again. The little boy went on staring at Miranda, and continued to stare, gazing over his shoulder as he was marched off, and wrenching his hand away from his virtuous partner who wanted to yank him round and make him behave. Miranda was the first angel he'd ever seen, and he meant to make the most of her.
The curtain dropped back into place. And suddenly Nicola felt sober - sober and responsible. Did that infant really think of them, not as schoolgirls dressed up, but as angels who had arrived, naturally enough, to re-enact - or didn't he even think that? Did he think, as perhaps one might if one were five, that this was the first Christmas being done over again?
[The next chapter describes how the play proceeds; the Boy in the extract is the Shepherd Boy, being played by Lawrie Marlow - the first to hear the angels' message and the one who has persuaded his older brother shepherds to come to Bethlehem - and the solo singer is her twin sister Nicola; the viewpoint character watching is their friend Patrick Merrick, up in the Minster's gallery. The Three Kings have just given their gifts...]
The Boy was beginning to look uneasy. He plucked at his belt, shook his head slightly, felt in his pouch, looked at three or four small objects, a shell, perhaps, a veined pebble, a feather, and put them back again, frowning: presents were the order of the day and he had nothing to give. And then he remembered his crook. He looked at it for a moment, and then his grasp tightened and he hid it behind his back. He couldn't give that. It was the best thing he had - the insignia of his profession.
But he had nothing else. And he could not be the only one to stand aside and give nothing. Very slowly, very reluctantly, he drew the crook from behind his back, crossed the stable and touched Mary's arm.
'May I give something to the Child?'
'Indeed you may. He has need of all you can offer.'
'It is a very small thing,' said the Boy humbly, 'beside these it is nothing at all. But it is the best I have.'
'Then it is everything.'
The Boy took heart. He walked carefully round the manger, and knelt where the Kings had knelt.
'Then I give the Child my crook. Lest He too, one day, should be a shepherd.'
[The play ends with the cast processing silently down the Minster aisle, and then Nicola sings:]
The organ stopped, which was her cue. She looked ahead to the West Door, past the watching eyes, and took a long breath, as if she were about to dive (which was rather how she felt). 'Try to sing it with regret,' Dr Herrick had said. '"Once in Royal David's City". Not now, you see. Now we have only been pretending. But once, long ago, if only we'd had the luck to be there, once, just once, this thing really happened."
She had never been able to do it to his entire satisfaction, rehearsing at school, but at this moment, with the storied centuries of the Minster about her, and the play, complete and entire behind her, she thought, suddenly, she might manage it. Her voice lifted, solitary and unaccompanied.
Difficult, Patrick thought, to think of that as Nicola singing - this immaculate succession of notes, lifting and drifting among the soaring pillars and arches as he had seen thistledown lift and drift one evening in the watermeadows, floating away at last above the trees...
The head of the procession passed out of sight below them. And then, under his feet, he heard Nicola for the last time, singing the repeat of the first verse, as the rest of the Choir filed away out of the Minster. He did not know why (there was nothing in the words to warrant it) but, as the verse ended, it seemed to him, the hairs crisping on his scalp, that she had been singing of the ultimate solitude of God.
~~~
Happy Solstice, Yule, Christmas to all of you.
From Antonia Forest's End of Term, which has the most magical description of the school's Nativity play being performed in the town's Minster. I am no longer a Christian, but I can't read this description of the performance of the play without shivers going down my spine.
[The background is that various of the book's principal and minor characters are having to do last-minute role swaps in the play, because of people being ill/running away and classic school-story shenanigans; the two viewpoint characters here are two of the Nativity angels - but none of that really matters at this point: what I love about these extracts is their atmosphere, the combination of genuine spiritual feeling, the sympathetic-magic of theatre, and the imagery of darkness and light...]
We begin backstage in the Minster cloisters.
~~~
It had stopped snowing. Untrodden whiteness covered the cloister garth, making a blanched shining in the dusk. On the far side, the Minster's bulk heaved up against the sky, roofs and towers, pinnacles and gargoyles, all smoothed and blobbed with snow. The silence was absolute.
The turmoil and disaster of the evening fell away. There was only this enchantment of the snow guarding their two hours' traffic of the stage...
Along the way they had come, footsteps hurried also. But it wasn't the rest of the Choir; a flustered young woman blundered in on them with an assortment of small children, two and two, at her heels, said, 'Oh dear, now we're wrong again,' and made as if to shoo the children out again...
[One of the five-year-old class, a 'gap-toothed infant', starts gazing at one of the angel characters:]
He was staring unblinkingly at Miranda.
With the gold cardboard circle on the back of her head, and her stern vivid face, she really did look, thought the surprised Nicola, rather like one of the carved angels in the reredos. With renewed thanks for not being thrown out into the snow, the young mistress formed the children into line again. The little boy went on staring at Miranda, and continued to stare, gazing over his shoulder as he was marched off, and wrenching his hand away from his virtuous partner who wanted to yank him round and make him behave. Miranda was the first angel he'd ever seen, and he meant to make the most of her.
The curtain dropped back into place. And suddenly Nicola felt sober - sober and responsible. Did that infant really think of them, not as schoolgirls dressed up, but as angels who had arrived, naturally enough, to re-enact - or didn't he even think that? Did he think, as perhaps one might if one were five, that this was the first Christmas being done over again?
[The next chapter describes how the play proceeds; the Boy in the extract is the Shepherd Boy, being played by Lawrie Marlow - the first to hear the angels' message and the one who has persuaded his older brother shepherds to come to Bethlehem - and the solo singer is her twin sister Nicola; the viewpoint character watching is their friend Patrick Merrick, up in the Minster's gallery. The Three Kings have just given their gifts...]
The Boy was beginning to look uneasy. He plucked at his belt, shook his head slightly, felt in his pouch, looked at three or four small objects, a shell, perhaps, a veined pebble, a feather, and put them back again, frowning: presents were the order of the day and he had nothing to give. And then he remembered his crook. He looked at it for a moment, and then his grasp tightened and he hid it behind his back. He couldn't give that. It was the best thing he had - the insignia of his profession.
But he had nothing else. And he could not be the only one to stand aside and give nothing. Very slowly, very reluctantly, he drew the crook from behind his back, crossed the stable and touched Mary's arm.
'May I give something to the Child?'
'Indeed you may. He has need of all you can offer.'
'It is a very small thing,' said the Boy humbly, 'beside these it is nothing at all. But it is the best I have.'
'Then it is everything.'
The Boy took heart. He walked carefully round the manger, and knelt where the Kings had knelt.
'Then I give the Child my crook. Lest He too, one day, should be a shepherd.'
[The play ends with the cast processing silently down the Minster aisle, and then Nicola sings:]
The organ stopped, which was her cue. She looked ahead to the West Door, past the watching eyes, and took a long breath, as if she were about to dive (which was rather how she felt). 'Try to sing it with regret,' Dr Herrick had said. '"Once in Royal David's City". Not now, you see. Now we have only been pretending. But once, long ago, if only we'd had the luck to be there, once, just once, this thing really happened."
She had never been able to do it to his entire satisfaction, rehearsing at school, but at this moment, with the storied centuries of the Minster about her, and the play, complete and entire behind her, she thought, suddenly, she might manage it. Her voice lifted, solitary and unaccompanied.
Difficult, Patrick thought, to think of that as Nicola singing - this immaculate succession of notes, lifting and drifting among the soaring pillars and arches as he had seen thistledown lift and drift one evening in the watermeadows, floating away at last above the trees...
The head of the procession passed out of sight below them. And then, under his feet, he heard Nicola for the last time, singing the repeat of the first verse, as the rest of the Choir filed away out of the Minster. He did not know why (there was nothing in the words to warrant it) but, as the verse ended, it seemed to him, the hairs crisping on his scalp, that she had been singing of the ultimate solitude of God.
~~~
Happy Solstice, Yule, Christmas to all of you.