I suppose I can’t postpone any longer the mention of Christmas.
Friday morning, the first of December, saw me join the queue for one of the last available spaces in the multi-storey car park. Joining the equally lengthy queue for the cash dispenser in the shopping mall, I had ample time to observe flocks of people with furrowed brows hastening from store to store as if there weren’t 23 more days of shopportunity.
A crowd began to gather round Santa’s grotto as a large group of primary school children filed into an orderly semicircle round a keyboard to sing carols. I recognised the familiar uniform of a school I’d been happy to teach in. Hovering on the fringe of a swarm of mammies, grannies, toddlers, babies in pushchairs and a smattering of dads, I looked at their little solemn faces under Santa hats, every eye obediently upon the teacher who was doing that conductor-y semaphore thing while silently mouthing the lyrics – and I listened, as every ex-teacher does, to make sure they were getting the words right.
I used to have terrible trouble with ‘Away in a Manger’ and the mixed infants who sang, “the little Lord Jesus lay down his wee ted”. But they sang out clear and true – the sole message of Christianity in that temple of crass commercialism. There was some surreptitious eye-dabbing and nose-blowing among the audience afterwards, myself included. I went on my way, temporarily uplifted.
It wasn’t to last. At the car park pay-station the machine spat out my new plastic fiver, which fluttered off a considerable distance with me in hot pursuit. Slippery little devils, those new notes – they slither out of your purse and won’t fold. A nice lady who’d waited with the patience of Job, listening to me swearing as the queue built up behind us, with true Christian charity exchanged it for coins. I sat, engine throbbing in a long traffic jam, starting at a billboard advertising a Christmas pantomime. I didn’t recognise any of the names ‘starring’ in it.
I became disillusioned early with pantomime. Nor have I seen many since Daughter Dear grew up that haven’t relied upon slapstick, vulgarity, blue humour, snide political allusions and pop songs delivered by superannuated actors from soap operas, dimly remembered one-hit wonders or second-rate comedians. Not that I mind a bit of honest vulgarity, but story, spectacle, song and tradition used to be the lynchpins of a family-friendly genre.
Tradition here decreed getting as many local children as possible onstage performing on alternate nights to guarantee a full house of their relatives. No matter what the pantomime plot, Act Two invariably opened to a concerted “Awww…” from the audience as the curtain rose upon ‘The Fairy Glade’ revealing a multitude of children culled from local dance classes. Elves and fairies, our chief task was to skip energetically, (“High knees children! High knees!”) in the right direction at the right time, or sit cross-legged perpetually grinning. I secretly yearned to be a fairy in a ballet-dress in the front row, but no, I was a small, sullen-looking elf in voluminous green taffeta knickerbockers with very tight elastic, which left weals (and probably a legacy of poor circulation) and a matching Noddy hat, my position onstage three-quarters obscured by the spangled net skirts of the impossibly beautiful Fairy Queen, as we somewhat incongruously chorused along with the late Frank Carson, “Oooh – why does a brown cow give white milk when it only eats green grass?”
In later life I was unwisely persuaded to write a series of Christmas pantomimes for our Debating Society – all in the best possible taste. The role of resident fairy was self-appropriated by an 18 stone ex-rugby playing Welsh university lecturer. He appeared annually in lurex tights, a string vest and a tutu, reading his unlearned lines off an enormous wand. All went swimmingly, until the year I wrote ‘The Man from Omagh-haw’, a Clint Eastwood-style spaghetti western. Word reached him while abroad that there was no fairy in the pantomime… but that’s a story for another day
