LENT 2018The headteacher was locked out of his own school, the most senior pupils carrying wooden batons to enforce the revolt. This happened every mid-Lent Monday.
The weapons this year were in the hands of Britta Sayers, Anna Duchamp and Jade-Marie Ahearn. They beat them against the doorframes to keep a rhythm to the chant.
Out you go, and stay you out,
We’re claiming back the day,
Say yes to fun, and in you’ll come,
Oh, master – whaddya say?
Every classroom window with a view onto the playground was colonised by faces, little noses pressed against the glass. The children’s fierce and uncompromising headmaster occupied the centre circle of the netball court, arms folded, foot tapping, about to get a taste of his own medicine. The younger ones squealed and giggled, watching this act of revenge unfold – a revenge that fell within the bounds of safety, the headmaster being in on the joke.
The sound of the Eldest Girls thumping their batons was thrilling in its barbarity. Boom boom boom boom – they counted the student body into another round of the chant.
We’re claiming back the day.
Say yes to fun, and in you’ll come,
Oh, master – whaddya say?
It was customary for Mr Crane to hold his ground for three renditions of the chant, then, loudly, playfully, he would agree to close the school. At this, everyone would spill from the building towards the chapel, so the festivities could begin. Mr Crane was well rehearsed after thirteen years in the post; he roared out his given line with Santa Claus good cheer: ‘Oh, all right then, let’s take the day off!’
But – boom boom boom boom – the Eldest Girls counted the pupils in for another round of the rhyme.
Then another.
Then another.
By the seventh turn, the girls were chanting alone and no one was smiling, Mr Crane especially. The little children were confused and growing anxious.
‘What’s going on? Why aren’t we letting him back in?’ asked a tearful Second Year infant.
Their teacher, Barbara Stanney, exchanged worried glances with her assistant, Faith Moran, before hurrying to the main doors, where Ruth French and Benjamin Hailey were already trying to prise batons from the unrelenting clutches of Anna and Jade-Marie.
Britta, meanwhile, orchestrated an end to it all, flipping the lock of the double doors that led onto the playground, before kicking those doors wide open. She held her baton aloft for one brief, triumphant moment, then released her grip, letting it drop from this great height with a clatter, an action that only the handsome coycrock teacher seemed to find amusing.
Anna and Jade-Marie relinquished their batons in similar fashion – a high hold, a noisy drop – and before anyone could ask what on earth they were playing at, the girls called out to the younger years, who ran cheering from their classrooms, the tiniest ones grabbing the hands of senior pupils as they went. This small but buoyant gang poured out across the playground, flowing around their headmaster, still stranded there in the centre circle, not giving him a backward glance, as they made their way to chapel carried along in joyous song.
‘Look at them,’ Ruth French was heard to mutter, not disparagingly, ‘the Pied Pipers of St Rita’s.’
For the clipping of the church some adults were required, otherwise there would not be a long enough loop of arms to reach all the way around the chapel’s exterior. The teachers who had, by now, caught up with their excitable charges, joined in, along with the three holy sisters – Agnes, Sarah and Clare – and some mothers of children from the younger years. The circle in place, Father Daniel began the hymn, one they knew the verses of without the aid of their books – ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ – and above them the bug-eyed gargoyles, with their horns and wings and fangs, stuck out their tongues in approval.
The singing done, the clipping could commence, and they advanced towards the grey stone walls in their circle, elbows drawn in, hands held high, before retreating, arms at full stretch. Advance, retreat, advance, retreat. The younger children oooh-ed and aah-ed in time with the motion.
Then it was time for the play.
When the weather was fine, as it was that day (by Lark standards this meant when the rain was not heavy and no storm was lashing), the play was held outdoors at the harbour. Rufus Huxley had set aside his school-caretaking tasks for the morning to construct the makeshift stage – a series of pallets screwed together, a pole frame on top, from which hung red silky curtains, fishing-net weights in the hems so they did not dance with the wind.
The committee of unusual suspects, who had been meeting at chapel in the preceding weeks to plan the Easter celebrations, these mid-Lent festivities included, set up a refreshment stall at the front of the Provisions Store, offering hot tea and coffee in mugs, orange squash for the children and a batch of freshly baked hot cross buns.
It was manned in rotation by Cat Walton and Ruth French, Martha Signal and Reuben Springer, Mary Ahearn and Ingrid Duchamp, while Rhoda Sayers ran back and forth, refreshing the sugar pot and the squash jugs. At one point, Margaritte Carruthers stood serving and custom slowed, word trickling across the cobbles that she had spiked the drinks with truth tinctures and love potions, or even a hallucinogenic dose of belladonna. Still, the usual women of the committee, Diana Crane and Elizabeth Bishy, Eleanor Springer and Miriam Calder, stood in line for their drinks and a sticky bun, only so they could say, with absolute authority, that the quality of the buffet was definitely not as good as last year.
‘Once the sun is past the yardarm,’ Eleanor Springer reassured her clan, ‘Jed will open up the Anchor.’ Then she bit into one of Martha Signal’s hot cross buns and pretended not to like it.
Dellie Leven was expected to take to the stage to introduce the annual production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, having taught the girls for much of the year, until Leah Cedars’ departure required her to pick up the slack of the Fourth and Fifth Year seniors. But it was the handsome coycrock teacher who leapt up onto the pallets, announcing that he was to be the day’s Dionysus, leading them all in a celebration of theatre, merrymaking and ritual madness.
Raising his voice above the chatter on the harbourside, he urged everyone to settle onto the benches that Huxley had arranged before the stage in crescents. The view from these seats took in not only the performance, but the expanse of a sea neither moody nor calm – a critic reserving its judgement perhaps, until the final curtain fell.
Parents with younger ones lined the front rows to ensure the best view. Before they sat, they removed the leaflets placed along the benches at regular intervals, held down by pebbles with holes in the middle, whittled by the action of the sea.
This was a new addition to proceedings – a programme.
Some cooed their appreciation of the A5 sheet headed THE PLAYERS. On the front was the novelty of a new photograph, sharply focused, taken no doubt with one of the coycrock teacher’s fancy mainland devices. It was a group image of the Eldest Girls, the three of them leaning against the mossy wall of the graveyard, the low glow of a sunset warming their faces, the sea grey and soupy behind them. On the back of the pamphlet were individual headshots of each girl, also new and seriously posed. Beneath these were typed strange little biographies – Jade-Marie Ahearn first got a taste for the stage playing ‘third sheep from the left’ in the celebrated St Rita’s Nativity play when she was just three and a half years old. Since then, she has gone on to become Lark’s most talked about alto-contralto, turning down endless offers to appear at the Albert Hall.
Others deemed these programmes unnecessary, wasteful even, especially when the wind snatched a few, sending them swooping out to sea.
The usual suspects – the headmaster, the doctor and their respective wives; Jed and Eleanor Springer, Miriam and Frank Calder, etc. – commandeered the benches on the right. Sister Agnes led her holy comrades, Sister Sarah and Sister Clare, to sit on this side too, though towards the back so that their starched white wimples would not obstruct anyone’s sightlines.
The ‘unusual suspects’ – Rhoda and Ingrid, Martha and Ruth, etc. – took the left benches, forcing the middle-grounders to choose sides. Dellie Leven, Hope Ainsley and Sarah Devoner all opted for the relative safety of the right, immediately questioning their decision – if the angling of their necks was anything to go by – when Father Daniel took his seat on the left next to the flowing white hair and flowery skirts of Margaritte Carruthers.
Abe Powell did not sit, refusing Reuben Springer’s encouraging pat of the bench space beside him, choosing to stand instead, cradling a lukewarm cup of tea. The coycrock girl was seen arriving stony-faced with her dog, unwilling to insert herself in the throng. She was avoiding the doctor, everyone knew, was overdue a medical examination, and that was likely why she took a seat, off to one side, on top of the stocks. Only the younger Signal boy, Michael, made a move on her, leaping up from his spot beside his mother, Martha, to sit on that splintery top board too, the girl edging away, creating an appropriate gap between them.
Saul Cooper observed all this from the Customs House, leaning against the white render of the building, smoking a cigarette. In the last moments before curtain-up, as the Cedars women arrived – Susannah and Leah, perching at the very end of one of the empty back rows on the left – Saul strode over decisively and took his seat on the right, next to Diana Crane.
‘Ladies and gentlemen of Lark!’ Benjamin Hailey was confident in his ringmaster’s voice. Though, dressed as he was, in a pair of shiny, pointed shoes, slim-fitting trousers and a pink shirt – of all colours! – the gathered agreed he had more the appearance of a clown. ‘I know you are used to seeing a story of fairies and mechanicals and love in the woods at these celebrations every year, but as our lovely Eldest Girls will also be the Eldest Girls in 2019, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until then to see them put on that particular show. This year we have been working on, well, a pet project of ours, something a little bit different …’
There was an uneasy rumble along the benches, turning to yelps when, on the snatching back of the red curtains, the play began with a literal bang – a blast of fire and a puff of coloured smoke – the science teacher’s obvious influence. The residual haze cleared to reveal Jade-Marie in a white ruffled shirt, brown hair scraped back, a moustache drawn on, sitting at a desk of conical flasks, concoctions and books. She spoke in a language not unlike Shakespeare, her English laced with Latin.
‘The reward of sin is death. That’s hard,’ she began nervously. ‘If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us.’
Murmurs of agreement came back from the benches – this phrase was familiar, coming as it did from the First Epistle General of John.
Jade-Marie was granted the confidence to be bolder.
‘Why then belike we must sin, and so consequently die.’ She looked out across the faces below her, as if expecting an answer. There was silence, except for one infant asking noisily of her mother why the girl had pen on her lip.
‘These metaphysics of magicians, and necromantic books are heavenly!’ Jade-Marie was strutting in a masculine fashion across the pallet stage, hands on hips. ‘Lines, circles, signs, letters and characters,’ she continued. ‘Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.’
Dellie Leven was heard to mutter, ‘Oh, dear Lord!’ before crossing herself.
Heads turned, as surreptitiously as they could, towards the headmaster. Would he call a halt, now that the initial godliness of the play, like those paper programmes, had disappeared on the wind? He did not. He stared forward.
Anna and Britta arrived on stage then in white nightdresses as the good and evil angels. The mood of the crowd softened; this would be a morality play after all. And it was, in essence. One man sells his soul to the Devil and takes the consequences – there was an admirably pious message in that. But there was also something to be drawn from the way the three girls dressed while playing the gossiping scholars – in blouses that tied at the throat, the current trend among the women who surrounded the tea urn after Sunday service. When Faustus and the Devil (a deep-voiced Britta, resplendent in a headdress of coiled goat horns) taunted the religious men at the Vatican office, the set bore a resemblance, through its particular arrangement of props, to a certain office closer to home, at the school of St Rita’s.
For a scene in Act Four where Faustus conjures up the ghosts of Alexander and his paramour, Anna and Britta arrived on stage in dripping wet robes. This was supposed to signify their journey back across the River Styx, but they more closely resembled a drowned fisherman and a sodden little girl, than they did figures from Ancient Greece.
Should anyone have dared to point out these parallels, though, they would only have incriminated themselves, become complicit in the accusations. The allusions were there, but also they were not.
What transpired on the stage was absolutely a morality play, one that spoke to the deep, shared understanding of a community. The audience listened as one, that was how it felt – as one mind, one collective subconscious, both good and bad, if a clear line can ever be drawn between the two.
When the girls delivered their epilogue – ‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight…’ – many of that audience found themselves crying, surprised by their emotions, unable to explain coherently what their tears were in aid of.
The curtains closed to a hush; the slip and slop of the sea in the harbour the only sound. The red-haired coycrock girl left immediately, head down, scuffing away past the smokehouse, as the Eldest Girls’ mothers broke the contemplative tension, standing to clap and cheer, allowing the others around them to do the same, to have their release.
They applauded on the left, and they applauded in the middle.
They even applauded on the right – but how could they not?