The Swish of the Curtain

by Pamela Brown

  “Doesn’t matter,” he told Nigel, who came to his assistance. “Good job it didn’t happen before.”

  The singing of “Away in a Manger” was rather shaky, as it was interrupted by these minor mishaps to the scenery. When they reached the last verse Bulldog, on tiptoe, pushing drawing pins into the backcloth, hissed, “Start again. I’m not ready.” So they sang it a second time, and by then the stage was set, with Mr. Smallgood and Whittlecock’s straw, and the crib, a wooden box with long legs attached, was standing near the bench where Lyn sat. Nigel took up his position beside the crib, and the curtains parted.

  “Just like a Christmas card,” murmured Mrs. Bell.

  The shepherds entered, looking artistically rough and ready with their antique lantern, and knelt by the crib offering their gifts. Lyn was furious to see Bulldog wriggling, and she said fiercely out of the corner of her mouth, “Keep still, you ape.” To pay her out for this rather obvious ticking off, he bit her hand sharply as he kissed it. Lyn jumped, but as this coincided with the entry of the angel, holding Maddy by the hand, it was not altogether out of place. All the shepherds, Joseph, and Mary rose to their feet in surprise.

  The angel said, “I bring you the one inhabitant of Bethlehem who has an holy heart, this little child, who found you your lodgings for this night of nights. Child, go and worship the Baby King.”

  Maddy knelt by the crib, her eyes shining with delight as she saw the imagined contents. She turned to Mary. “What can I give Him?”

  “What have you to give?”

  Maddy shook her head sadly. “I have nothing. Oh, He has pulled my hair!” She turned to the shepherds. “Oh, men from the fields, have you a knife, that I may cut off my hair, as a present to this Baby?”

  Jeremy handed her a dangerous-looking sheath knife, and she stood up, her head on one side, so that her hair hung down away from her head. Just as she was about to plunge the knife into the yellow tresses the angel cried, “Stop!” Maddy dropped the knife and turned to the golden figure.

  “Do not ruin your hair. It is a present from Him to you. He loves all beautiful things, and He would that you keep it. Bend over the crib.”

  Maddy did so in silence. Then she said, “He has taken one hair.” She knelt, and the angel said, “The prayers of a little child are as acceptable to Him as the gold, frankincense, and myrrh of princes. Let us adore Him.” They sang, “O come all ye Faithful”, and the children and teachers joined in.

  Back in the dressing-room Sandra gasped, “Give me a drink of water, someone.” She was surrounded by people praising her singing. Maddy said to Lyn, “You were good.” Lyn was surprised, for it was not often that she received praise from Maddy. The children, led by the teachers, were still clapping when they came into the hall in their ordinary clothes.

  It was then that Lyn noticed that the bishop was there. He must have come in while they were dressing beforehand. Pushing his way through a swarm of children he came and congratulated them.

  “I think,” he said, “that whoever trained you in your acting deserves especial praise.”

  “That was Lyn, sir,” said Nigel promptly.

  “Very creditable, very creditable,” the bishop told her. “And your own performance was very polished, very polished. In fact, the only fault in the whole play, as far as I could see, was the shepherds, who – I hope you won’t take this as an insult – were rather – wooden.”

  The shepherds hung their heads and agreed that they might have been better.

  “I felt so peculiar in a little short petticoat,” Bulldog told him, “I didn’t dare act, for fear I should look funny.”

  “That is your drawback,” agreed the bishop, his thin face wrinkling into a charming smile. “And when I think of you in your ballet skirt, as you were in the concert last summer, I wonder how you can appear on the stage at all without convulsing the audience.”

  “I can see,” said Lyn, as the bishop turned away to speak to Mrs. Bell, “that unless you are to be funny we must give you small parts.”

  Bulldog grinned. “Suits me. I have never felt so ridiculous as I did tonight.”

  “And now, children,” the vicar announced, “just before going home” – there were loud groans – “I want you to thank these young people who have entertained you this evening. Hip, hip—”

  The ensuing hurrahs nearly broke the ear-drums of the Blue Door Theatre Company.

  When the children went out of the door there were delighted squeals. “Ooh, snow!” “Look at the snow!”

  There was a fierce snowball fight raging within two minutes, but this had to be stopped when several little girls came back in tears, with snow down their necks.

  “We shall have to stay and see that everything’s left tidily,” said Nigel, although he was aching to be out in the snow.

  The teachers gathered round the dressing-room fire and drank tea; the Blue Doors were included in long adult conversations while the flakes dropped silently and enticingly against the window panes. At last the vicar and Mrs. Bell and the teachers went, and they were able to get on with the clearing up, of which there was plenty. They sang as they swept floors and folded clothes, and told what they were hoping to have for Christmas. When the theatre looked its old neat self again they put on their coats and scarves, switched off the lights, and went out into the cold, white world.

  “Ooh, it’s lovely!”

  Maddy jumped up and down in excitement, slipped on the already freezing snow, and landed on the place already bruised by a fall at the skating-rink. Jeremy guffawed loudly, and received a snowball in his mouth. They slid most of the way home, and, where the pavements were cleared, they snowballed. Passing by the statue of the late Mayor of Fenchester they could not resist the temptation of aiming one at his bewhiskered face. Nigel alone caught his worship squarely on his venerable nose. A heavy hand descended on his shoulder, and he wheeled round sharply. There stood a hefty police constable with snow collecting on his broad shoulders.

  “Now, young man, enough of that. If it wasn’t Christmas Eve I might have seen you do it, but, as it is, the snow got in me eye. You clear off.”

  As they ran Maddy remarked, “He looked like Father Christmas in mourning.”

  They held hands and slid down the hill towards the bottom of Goldenwood Avenue.

  “Why ever haven’t we got a toboggan?” Jeremy wanted to know.

  Bulldog shouted suddenly, “Wait a minute. Nigel, when we came to the Corner House wasn’t there one in the shed?”

  Nigel thumped a frozen fist on to a frozen palm. “Oh, boy, of course there was! What a wonderful idea. Come on, we’ll go out tobogganing at once.”

  Sandra looked at her watch. “Don’t be silly, it’s almost nine. Can you imagine our parents letting us go out at this time of night?”

  “It would be marvellous to go,” said Bulldog yearningly. “But they wouldn’t let us. And tomorrow there’ll be relations oozing round everywhere at home, and we’ll have to stay in and be polite.”

  “Same here,” agreed Jeremy. “We never go out on Christmas Day.”

  “And by the time we’re rid of our unpleasant relations the snow will have gone,” mourned Vicky.

  “We must go tonight,” declared Lyn. “I shall die if I don’t.”

  “I know what; we’ll go to bed, then get up and go out on to the fields with the toboggan. Miller’s Hill ought to be marvellous,” said Jeremy excitedly.

  “O.K., then. Shall we meet at ten o’clock at the bottom of the avenue?” Nigel, the plan-maker, was well away. “Whoever is there will wait till quarter past, then they will go. I’ll leave the toboggan by our side gate, just here,” he pointed to the corner, as they approached it, “and everyone as they pass will look to see if it’s gone. If it’s not, they take it down themselves. O.K.?”

  “Marvellous,” burbled Lyn. “And there’s going to be a moon, when those clouds go away.”

  As the seven dispersed Nigel reminded them, “Put bundles in your beds, so that if
your mothers go in to put things in your stockings they’ll think you’re still there.”

  The three Halfords went into the Corner House, and, as they discarded their snowy garments, Mrs. Halford called from her sitting-room, “Your supper is laid up here. Come and tell me all about it.”

  As they ate their supper they kept their mother amused with a lively description of the party. When Bulldog choked, while imitating a Sunday School child faced with a plate of cakes, Mrs. Halford exclaimed, as she sat in her wheeled chair:

  “Well, I must say you’re still frightful babies. I thought you were too old to get as excited as this over Christmas.”

  Bulldog kicked Vicky under the table, for he could see that she was about to tell her mother of the proposed tobogganing escapade. He just checked her in time.

  She said afterwards, “It seemed so caddish to deceive her, when she was looking so well and sweet as tonight.”

  “My dear girl,” Bulldog told her exasperatedly, “can’t you think for yourself? If we told her, she’d either not let us go, which would spoil our fun, or else let us go, and then be worried about it, which would spoil her fun. Much better to keep it dark.”

  Vicky saw his point. In her room she put on some navy slacks, a thick polo-necked jumper, and some tall bed-socks, into which she stuffed the legs of the trousers. Round her head she tied a scarf and put on her raincoat. After placing the dummy in the bed she read a library book till quarter to ten, then, Wellingtons in hand, she tiptoed along the landing, down the stairs, and out of the front door, leaving it on the latch. Nigel was bending over the toboggan when she reached it. They did not speak till they were well on the way down the hill, dragging the sledge behind them.

  “Seen Bulldog?”

  “No; when I left him he was trying to find Dad’s old Balaclava helmet to keep his head warm.”

  A little group of figures stood at the end of the road, which, when they got nearer, they found to be the Faynes and the Darwins, all wrapped up in their heaviest clothes and wearing water-boots. They greeted each other excitedly. The night was clear now that the snow had stopped, and the moon, playing hide-and-seek with the smoke-coloured clouds, looked down on country covered with a crisp layer of snow, like icing on a Christmas cake.

  Bulldog arrived in a few minutes’ time, wearing his father’s Balaclava helmet. It was of khaki wool with ear-holes, through which his ears poked, pink and freezing.

  “You look like one of the seven dwarfs.”

  Their laughter rang out across the frozen night. Taking turns at pulling the sleigh, they reached the top of Miller’s Hill, and Nigel announced his intention of being the first to try the descent, in case it should be dangerous.

  He lay on his front on the wooden boards, and they pushed it off, straining their ears for the swish of the snow as he sped down the dark hillside. He returned in a few minutes, breathless and glowing.

  “Goes like a bird,” he told them. “But it’ll be better with two people on.”

  Bulldog and Lyn went down next, and on their return could find no adjectives good enough to describe the journey. Maddy and Sandra went next, then Vicky and Jeremy, and for the next hour they sped down and toiled up the snow-covered hill. They had several spills, and when they all climbed on to the toboggan with Maddy sitting on Jeremy’s shoulders the toboggan veered so madly away from its usual course that Maddy was precipitated into a drift several feet deep. Their revels were ended by the silvery chimes of the town hall striking midnight, and then a burst of joyful pealing from all the church steeples.

  “Ring out, wild bells

  To the wild sky,”

  sang Sandra.

  “I think,” Nigel suggested, “we ought to be going home.”

  They groaned, but did not argue, as they were all feeling fagged from trudging through snow in water-boots. On the way home they sang all the carols they knew. The barren field resounded with breathless young voices, singing their anthems to the snows.

  11

  THE SWAN OF AVON

  Lyn could not sleep. It was eleven o’clock, and she had been in bed for two hours, tossing and turning and shaking up her pillow in an effort to get comfortable. It was a welcome diversion when the front-door bell rang. She jumped out of bed, ran along the landing, and peered over the bannisters as her mother opened the door.

  “Why, Bishop!” Lyn heard her exclaim in astonishment. “How nice to see you!”

  “I hope I’ve not called at too late an hour,” said the bishop, in his cool, cultured voice.

  “Of course not. Do come in.”

  The bishop was ushered into the drawing-room. Lyn heard him greet her father, then the door was closed, but not shut. She crept a little farther down the stairs, and strained her ears; they were exchanging pleasantries. Then the bishop said, “The real object of my visit tonight was to make a request. Can you spare your children for two days?”

  “Why, yes,” replied Mrs. Darwin, in a puzzled tone. “I suppose so.”

  “I am planning a little trip on the twenty-second of April, and I have just been to see Mr. and Mrs. Halford and Mr. and Mrs. Fayne. I have gained their permission for the children to come, so I’m sure Jeremy and Lynette would like to come.”

  “Where do you propose to go?” asked Mr. Darwin.

  Lyn crept down a few more steps, to hear the bishop say:

  “To Stratford-on-Avon. I always attend the Shakespeare Festival on the twenty-third of April, and I should like to take the Blue Door Theatre Company, knowing how interested they are in acting.”

  “How kind of you, Bishop. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.”

  “Thrilled isn’t the word,” thought Lyn, gripping the stair on which she sat. Shakespeare Festival. Stratford-on-Avon. The words drummed in her brain, carried by a rush of overpowering excitement. Her first impulse was to go and tell Jeremy; then she heard the bishop speak again.

  “We shall start on the Wednesday afternoon, and get back late on Friday night, after seeing the plays. It will be Romeo and Juliet in the evening and Twelfth Night in the afternoon.”

  Lyn nearly fell down the stairs with delight. This was just the kind of pretence game that she and Sandra used to have when they were younger. They would pretend that all sorts of wonderful adventures happened to them, and they usually began by some kind person taking them somewhere. It was cold sitting on the stairs, and her nightie was thin, but she stayed to try to hear more about the expedition.

  “They will only need night-clothes and toothbrushes,” the bishop said, and Lyn added mentally “and an autograph album”.

  Sitting on the prickly stair carpet she was lost in daydreams; suddenly the door opened and her parents and the bishop came out. Luckily there was no light on the stairs, so she kept as still as she could. Her parents did not notice her as they ushered the bishop out. Directly the drawing-room door was shut she ran into Jeremy’s bedroom and jumped on to his bed, shaking him by the shoulder.

  “Wake up, Jeremy, do you hear? Wake up!”

  “Wazzermatter?” grumbled Jeremy, burrowing his head further into the pillows.

  “The most wonderful thing! Do wake up and listen!”

  But Jeremy was asleep again. She pulled his ears hard and he sat up, furious.

  “Leave me alone, girl. Darn you!”

  “Jeremy, do listen! The bishop has just called.”

  “Who?”

  “The bishop. He wants to take us to Stratford-on-Avon. All of us. The Faynes and the Halfords too.”

  “Whaffor?” asked Jeremy, preparing to go to sleep again.

  “To see two Shakespeare plays and the Festival.”

  Jeremy, now wide awake, crossly asked, “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “I’ve been trying to. Now, are you awake?”

  “Lor’, yes! How super!”

  There was a flow of excited questions.

  When Lyn at last got back to bed she fell asleep and dreamed that she was playing Juliet, sitting on the top sta
ir of the staircase, while the bishop, as Romeo, occupied the bottom one.

  * * *

  The seven of them lived in a state of continual excitement during the following week. They could talk and think of nothing but the Festival, and they read Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet most carefully, each giving their opinions on how the plays ought to be produced.

  Sandra’s mother bought her a new blue costume for the occasion, and Lyn had a new attaché case.

  The afternoon of the 22nd April found them awaiting the bishop at the station. For the first time in her life Maddy was carrying a handbag. She was wearing her grey costume, with a kilted skirt and blazer to match, and her handbag matched her red jumper. Jeremy and Bulldog wore grey flannel suits, but Nigel had a blue sports coat. As it was true April weather they all carried mackintoshes. At last they saw the gaunt figure of the bishop coming towards them.

  “So you’re all here?” He counted them carefully. “I mustn’t lose any of you on the way, or your mothers would never let me take you out again.” He hurried them into a compartment.

  “How nice,” remarked Maddy, after she had dived for a corner seat, “we all fit in. Four on each side. And if the bishop sits on the same side as Bulldog they will cancel out each other’s size.”

  Sandra made the warning face that means, “If you don’t shut up you’ll hear about this afterwards,” but the others, who were in holiday mood, only laughed. The train started up and steamed out of the station.

  “What time shall we get there?” asked Nigel.

  “About ten o’clock,” was the reply; “and we have to change trains three times.”

  “I love train journeys,” confided Maddy; “and this will be the longest I have ever been.”

  “You won’t like it much at about nine o’clock this evening,” the bishop warned her.

  “I expect she’ll go to sleep. She generally does in the car,” said Sandra.