by David Lodge
It must sound as if I was already stagestruck, but in fact I wasn’t when I embarked on the project. I was in the sixth form at St Aloysius’ Catholic Grammar School, studying English, French, Latin and Economics, and intended to read Law at university, with the ambition of becoming a barrister (an idea implanted by my father, who was a solicitor’s chief clerk, and had set his heart on my becoming a star of the legal profession). I never expected to end up as a director of stage musicals anywhere from Scunthorpe to Sydney – mostly touring productions of golden oldies like Oklahoma! and The King and I. I did direct a new musical in the West End a few years ago, but you probably never heard of it – it folded after three weeks. Still, I have great hopes of my new project, a musical version of Antony and Cleopatra called Cleo! I’ve written the book myself.
But I digress. Back to the Nativity play, The Story of Christmas, as it was rather unimaginatively entitled. I wanted to call it The Fruit of the Womb, but the parish priest, Father Stanislaus Lynch, wouldn’t have it – the first of many battles we had over the play. He said my title was indecent. I pointed out that it was a quotation from the Hail Mary: ‘and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’ He said that, taken out of context, the words had a different effect. I said: ‘What you mean is that in context they have no effect at all, because Catholics recite prayers in a mindless drone, without paying any attention to what they’re saying. My play is designed to shock them out of their mental torpor, into a new awareness of what Christmas is all about – Incarnation.’ I was a fluent and arrogant youth – at least in intellectual debate. In other areas of life, such as girls, I was less assured.
But Father Stan, as we called him, replied: ‘That’s all very well, but there’ll have to be a poster advertising it. I won’t have the word “womb” stuck up in my church porch. The Union of Catholic Mothers wouldn’t like it.’ At home I complained bitterly about this example of philistine ecclesiastical censorship, until one of my sisters said that Fruit of the Womb reminded her of ‘Fruit of the Loom’, in those days a well-known trade mark for cotton underwear, and I decided to abandon the title without further resistance.
Dah dah dah, dah dah dah . . . There were other pieces of music in The Story of Christmas, played while the scenery was being changed behind the curtain, and setting the mood for the next scene. I chose Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’ for the Annunciation, a theme from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade for the Three Kings, and the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ for the Flight into Egypt. My father had a decent collection of classical music on 78s, and used to let me play them on our radiogram, a walnut-veneered monolith that stood in the bay window of the front parlour. But it’s the ‘Shepherd’s Song’, only the ‘Shepherd’s Song’, that triggers memories of the play, and of Dympna Cassidy. I chose it, of course, to introduce the scene where the shepherds of Bethlehem come to venerate the infant Jesus, but it spread into other parts of the play in the course of rehearsals.
* * *
It all started one Sunday evening early in November, at a youth club hop. Father Stan and I were sitting on a pair of folding chairs on the edge of the dance floor, if one might so dignify the dusty, splintering floorboards of the parish hall, watching the couples shuffling round to Nat King Cole groaning ‘Too Young’ from a portable record-player.
I was sitting down because I didn’t dance, couldn’t dance, pretended I didn’t want to dance, though truly it was a reluctance to look silly while learning to dance that made me a wallflower. I attended these events on the pretext of being Secretary of the Youth Club Committee: drawn by a secret need to behold Dympna Cassidy, exquisite torture though it was to watch her swaying in the arms of some other youth. Fortunately most of the boys in the club were as shy as I was, and the girls were compelled much of the time to dance with each other, as Dympna was doing with her friend Pauline that evening to the syrupy strains of ‘Too Young’; and even when she had a male partner, club protocol prohibited close contact between dancing couples. That was why Father Stan was there: to make sure light was always visible between them.
They say that we are much too young,
Too young to really be in love . . .
Not that I was in love with Dympna Cassidy. That was the problem.
She was beautiful and buxom, with jade green eyes and copper-coloured hair, which, freshly washed for social occasions, surrounded her head in a shimmering haze of natural curls. Her complexion was a glowing, translucent white, like the surface of a fine alabaster statue, and her underlip had a delicious pout. When she smiled two dimples appeared in her cheeks which I associated with her name, her first name. Cassidy was rather lacking in poetic resonance, but Dympna – it was eloquent not only of her dimples, but of her whole person. The syllables had a soft, yielding, pneumatic quality that I imagined her body would possess when clasped in an embrace. And how I longed to embrace it! How I yearned to squeeze that voluptuous form like a cushion against my chest, and press my lips on the pouting perfection of her mouth, in the manner I had observed in a thousand cinematic love scenes. But I didn’t love Dympna Cassidy. Nor was I prepared to pretend that I did. And in that time and place the only way you would get to kiss a girl like her was to do one or the other. That is to say, I would have had to declare myself publicly as her steady boyfriend.
And here I have to make a rather shameful confession: I thought I would be lowering myself if I courted Dympna Cassidy. It wasn’t simply that she came from the wrong side of the tracks, though she did; her large and slightly raffish family lived in a tenement flat on a council estate, whereas we owned our own home, a dignified Victorian terraced house, with a flight of steps leading up to the front door. It wasn’t that she dropped her aitches occasionally, and tended to elide the middle consonant of ‘butter’ and ‘better’. I could have lived with these handicaps if Dympna Cassidy had possessed some qualities of mind to compare with the attractions of her body. But her mind was conspicuously empty. There was nothing to be found in it except a few popular songs, the names of film stars, fashion notes, and anecdotes about her teachers. She attended a technical school, having failed the 11-plus examination in which I had distinguished myself, and was following what was called a commercial course. She was being trained to be a shorthand typist, though her own inclination was to be a sales assistant in a dress shop. I knew all this because I took the opportunity to chat to her – outside church after Sunday Mass, while clearing up the parish hall after a youth club evening, or during one of the club’s occasional rambles through the Kent countryside. I could tell that Dympna was interested in me: intrigued and attracted by the slightly foppish air I cultivated when out of school uniform, my long hair, green corduroy jacket and mustard waistcoat. I was aware that she had attached herself to no other boy, though she had many admirers in the parish. I felt sure that she would reciprocate, if I would only make the first move.
But I hung back. My future was clearly marked out for me, and Dympna Cassidy had no place in it: study, examinations, honours, prizes; years of effort and self-denial ultimately rewarded by a distinguished legal career. Dympna’s kind had a totally different attitude to life: leave school as soon as you could, get a job however repetitive and banal, and live for the hours of leisure and recreation, for dancing, shopping, going to the pictures, ‘having a good time’. Consuming one’s youth in a splurge of thoughtless, superficial pleasure, before relapsing into a dull, domesticated adulthood just like one’s parents, struggling to bring up a family on inadequate means. Becoming involved with Dympna would, I was certain, drag me down into that abyss. I swear that I thought one kiss would do it, one kiss and I would be set on a course leading to a premature and imprudent marriage. And marriage would not be kind to Dympna Cassidy. You could see what she would look like in twenty years’ time by looking at her mother: a sagging bosom, a waist thickened by childbearing, and hollowed cheeks where the back teeth were missing. Dympna would never again be as beautiful as she was now, so I told myself gloomily, watching her leading Pa
uline in the foxtrot, chattering away inanely about a pair of shoes that she had seen in a shop window. This topic seemed to engage their interest for the duration of the set; they were still talking about it every time they rotated past me and Father Stan.
‘You know Mrs Noonan who teaches in the Infants,’ he said suddenly. I admitted that I did: she had taught me ten years earlier. ‘And you know she puts on a Nativity play every Christmas, with the children. Well, she’s got to go into hospital next week for an operation, and she’ll be on convalescent leave until January. I’ve been thinking, wouldn’t it be a fine thing if the youth club took on the job for this year? The Nativity play, I mean. It would be good to have something a little more . . . grown up, for once. Something the young people of the parish could relate to. D’you think you might be able to organise something, Simon?’
‘All right.’
‘Well, that’s grand,’ said Father Stan, somewhat taken aback by the speed of my assent. ‘Are you sure you’ve got time? I know they work you very hard at St Aloysius.’
‘I’ll manage, Father. Leave it to me.’
‘Well, that’s very good of you. I’ll see if the Catholic Truth Society publish a suitable play. I don’t think the one Mrs Noonan uses would be quite the ticket.’
‘I’ll write the play myself.’
As soon as he had mentioned the Nativity play a tableau had formed in my mind’s eye: Dympna Cassidy as Our Lady, stunningly beautiful, her copper filigree hair shining like a halo in the footlights, and myself as St Joseph, supporting her on the road to Bethlehem, my arm round her shoulders, or even her waist. I had found the perfect alibi for getting into close physical contact with Dympna Cassidy without incurring any moral or emotional obligations.
‘You’d have to show me the script before it’s performed, just to make sure there’s no heresy.’ Father Stan exposed his irregular, nicotine-stained teeth in a wolfish grin.
I wrote the play, believe it or not, over two weekends. I didn’t bother with auditions, partly because there wasn’t time, and partly because nobody would have turned up for them. There was no thespian tradition at the Youth Club of our Lady of Perpetual Succour. I picked out the likeliest members of the club for my cast and, as we say in the profession, made offers without asking them to read. Naturally I approached Dympna Cassidy first. When I told her I wanted her to play the Virgin Mary she went pink with pleasure, but shook her head and bit her underlip and said that she had never acted in her life. I told her not to worry. I had some experience of acting in school plays, and I would help her. I looked forward to intimate coaching sessions in the front parlour at home, with the radiogram providing some suitable background music. Dah dah dah, dah dah dah . . . Did I already have that piece of music in mind?
I deferred showing Father Stan the script on the grounds that we were continually revising it in the course of rehearsals. But eventually he got suspicious and borrowed a copy from another member of the cast, and there was the most almighty row. He came round to our house one evening, fortunately when my parents were out, grasping the rolled-up script in his fist like a baton. He waved it furiously in my face. ‘What’s the meaning of this filth? What do you mean by soiling the spotless purity of our Blessed Mother?’
I knew at once that he was referring to the stage direction at the end of Act 1, Sc i: ‘JOSEPH and MARY embrace’.
Admittedly there wasn’t a great deal of biblical authority for this scene. It was an imaginative attempt to evoke the life of Mary when betrothed to Joseph, and before she had any idea that she was to become the Mother of God. I was aiming at a contemporary style in my play – ‘relevance’, it would have been called a decade later. No pious platitudes and biblical archaisms, but colloquial speech and natural behaviour, that modern teenagers could relate to. I imagined Mary as a rather merry, high-spirited, even skittish young girl at this stage of her life, engaged to an older and rather serious man. I wrote a scene in which Mary calls in at Joseph’s carpentry shop and tries to persuade him to go for a walk. Joseph refuses, he has a job to finish, and there is a kind of lovers’ tiff, which is soon made up. And their reconciliation is sealed with a kiss.
Several members of the cast questioned the propriety of this scene at the first read-through. But I argued that it was natural behaviour between an engaged couple who didn’t at that stage know that they were going to bring the Messiah into the world. Dympna herself didn’t contribute to this discussion. She kept her eyes down and her lips closed. I think she had a good idea of the real motivation for the scene.
After a couple more read-throughs, I started blocking out the moves, starting from the top, but I found that when I came to the curtain line of Act 1, Sc. i –
JOSEPH: Mary, I can never be cross with you for long.
MARY: Nor I with you
– my nerve failed me. I simply said: ‘Then Joseph and Mary embrace, and the curtain comes down.’
‘Aren’t you going to rehearse the kiss?’ said Magda Vernon, who had volunteered to be Stage Manager. She was an odd girl, tall and skinny, with glasses that kept falling off her snub nose, and spiky black hair that stuck out in all directions, as if she had just got out of bed. She favoured long dark-hued sweaters that she pulled cruelly out of shape, tugging the hem down low over her hips, and stretching the sleeves so that they covered her hands like mittens, as though she were trying to hide herself in the garment. It was rumoured that she had had some kind of nervous breakdown, and tried to run away from home, and that her parents made her join the youth club so that she would become more normal. But she didn’t seem to enjoy it much. The Nativity play was the first event that had aroused the slightest flicker of interest in her. She had supported me in the discussion about the propriety of the embrace, for which I was grateful. But now I wished she would not interfere.
‘There isn’t time to rehearse everything at this stage,’ I said. ‘Could we move on to Scene Two?’ But the next time we ran the first scene, I stopped it again just short of the final kiss.
‘Shouldn’t you decide what kind of a kiss it’s going to be?’ Magda insisted. ‘I mean, who kisses who? And is it a kiss on the lips or on the cheek?’
‘It’d better be on the cheek,’ said the boy playing Herod, ‘or Father Stan will have a fit.’ There was a general titter.
‘I really haven’t thought about it,’ I lied, having thought of little else for days. ‘I think we should leave it till we have the costumes.’
Later, when the cast had gone home, and Magda and I were alone, going through a list of props that would be required, she gave me an arch look: ‘I don’t believe you know how to.’
‘How to what?’
‘How to kiss a girl. I’ll teach you if you like.’
‘I can manage perfectly well on my own, thank you.’
But later, walking home in the cold December night, I rather regretted having turned down the offer, and mentally rehearsed various strategies for reviving it. But the very next day Father Stan exploded, the first scene of my play was scrapped, and I had no further pretext for requesting Magda’s tuition.
So I never did get to embrace Dympna Cassidy. I got my arm round her waist on the road to Bethlehem, but she was wearing so many layers of clothing in that scene that it was no great tactile experience. By this time, in any case, I’d rather lost sexual interest in Dympna, and was much more preoccupied with her shortcomings as an actress. The manic, obsessive quest for perfection that possesses those who make plays had me in thrall. Dympna kept forgetting her lines. And when she remembered she delivered them in a flat and barely audible voice. If I criticised her she sulked and said that she’d never asked to be in my stupid play anyway. The only thing to be said for her was that she looked sensational. So what I did was to cut her lines to the bone and make her part consist mostly of silent action with background music. I noticed that she liked the ‘Shepherd’s Song’, and would hum it to herself when she was in a good mood, so I decided to use it as a kind of leitmotif, whe
never Mary appeared. This required some nifty work from Magda in the wings – she had to operate the portable gramophone and act as prompter at the same time – but it proved highly effective. I had stumbled on one of the primary resources of musical theatre: the reprise. No prizes for guessing what the audience was humming as they filed out of the parish hall. Our play was a hit. I walked Magda home afterwards, and we kissed in her front porch until our lips were sore.
Magda became my first girlfriend, until we both went to different universities the following year, and drifted apart. I read law as planned, but spent all my time mucking about in the Drama Society and the Opera Society, scraped a third-class degree, and to the great disgust of my father went straight into drama school. Curiously enough, Magda had been bitten by the same bug. She did theatre studies at university, became an ASM at various provincial reps and finally went into television, where she has done rather well as a production manager. We meet occasionally at showbiz occasions, and when we embrace each other, as showbiz people do when they meet, she always teases me by saying, ‘Lips or cheek, darling?’
And Dympna? Well, she didn’t become a typist or a shop assistant. And she didn’t lose her figure or her teeth. Somebody spotted her potential as a photographic model, and she had a very successful run in the late 1950s, appearing on the front covers of several women’s magazines, until the Jean Shrimpton look put her out of fashion. According to my mother, she married a rich businessman and retired from modelling. They live in a manor house near Newmarket and own a string of racehorses . . . I’ve been thinking I might write and ask them if they’d like to invest in Cleo!
A Wedding to Remember
Emma Dobson, everyone who knew her agreed, was a young woman of strong character. ‘Emma has a clear vision of her goals and priorities,’ the headmistress of the sixth form college where she was Head Girl wrote in her final report, ‘and she has the ability and determination to realise them.’ This prediction proved accurate. She obtained a good 2.1 in Modern Languages at Bath University (a degree highly valued by employers because of its emphasis on current affairs rather than literature) and a Master’s degree in Business Studies at Warwick. During the postgraduate course she lived conveniently and economically at home, a spacious modern house in the leafiest part of Solihull, and at the end of it was accepted for a fast-track training scheme by a national bank. She joined their Midland headquarters in Birmingham, where she was soon promoted to a responsible position in the Private Clients department. Her father, who was MD of a company which manufactured components for the car industry, gave her an interest-free loan to put down the deposit on a one-bedroom flat on the seventh floor of a new building overlooking a canal in the middle of the city, part of a system of drab industrial waterways recently transformed into an environment for leisure pursuits and stylish urban living.
