Infectious joy
Roy Hattersley
The bad news was broken to us by the parish magazine. Christmas Eve is a Sunday this year. So the vicar, who presides over three parishes and must spread himself over as many evensongs, will not be available for the carol service which is traditionally held on the village green. It seemed outrageous that Christianity should be allowed to get in the way of our Christmas festivities. But, on the first Sunday in Advent, Saint Giles more than made up for the seasonal errors and omissions. The children of the church, augmented by a couple of adults, presented a pageant of village history.
Two tinselled angels — one silver and one gold — acted like a Greek chorus, setting the scenes and commenting on the action. Some of it was pure invention. There is absolutely no reason to believe that King Alfred’s son, Edward, visited the village in AD 924 and urged our rude forefathers to resist the Vikings, succour the needy and build a church. But no one cared. We were all too entranced by the performances to concern ourselves with historical detail. There is something peculiarly endearing about children playing adults in period costume. It was not just the stars of the show who made us smile with gentle pleasure. The whole cast performed with an infectious joy.
The company was led to the finale by a boy of six or seven who carried a twinkling star on a pole. It was not his only appearance during the evening. Several times he had darted round the church with no purpose other than the expression of his exuberance. At the centre of the closing tableau, a Virgin Mary — of about the star carrier’s age — sat absolutely still, clutching the plastic Infant Jesus. Even when votes of thanks were offered to the parent–producers and bouquets of flowers handed out, she did not move a muscle.
Because of such distractions, it was not until we arrived at 1890 that I realised that some of what I was watching was fiction. Then the discovery increased my admiration for the whole event. A note in the programme confessed that the battle between the Methodist and Church of England Sunday schools — both claiming the same ground on which to enjoy their annual ‘treat’ — had no ‘local historical basis’. The scene, it explained, was ‘borrowed from North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell’. As the young players fought the battle of the denominations, the more literary hearts in the audience swelled with pride at the erudition of our parochial church council Sunday school. Our church council? I do not usually regard the personal pronoun as appropriate to the relationship between Saint Giles and me. But at that moment I proudly claimed affinity.
Some time before we were reminded of ‘the tensions between the different types of Christians’ in Victorian England about 1647, according to the action of the pageant — I noticed that a cardboard reredos arch had been built in the nave just below the chancel steps. Its purpose became clear when ‘a Puritan’ — dressed in black from buckled shoes to tall hat arrived to complain that Saint Giles had not abandoned Popish practices which should have been discarded when news of the Reformation reached the village, circa 1520. The Puritan — being an iconoclast — smashed down the reredos screen in a single blow. His wrath had been provoked, in part, by the continuing display of the Eyre Copper, a plaque engraved with Roman Catholic rubrics.
In the early 18th century, Rowland Eyre, a local philanthropist, had decreed that in acknowledgment of his benefice to the local poor — the symbols of his faith must be prominently displayed in Saint Giles. Worse still, in the view of Cromwell’s major-generals, who searched the land for Popish heretics, the alms were always to be distributed on the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Eyre Copper survived and still hangs in the church. To my shame, I did not know of its existence until the children’s pageant lightened my darkness.
Towards the end of the performance, Arnold, the village Everyman, was persuaded by the taunts of two young women to answer Kitchener’s call to fight for King and Country. He ran off to the recruiting officer, gaily waving his straw hat to the girls he left behind. In the next scene the vicar, incumbent of Saint Giles in 1918, preached an Armistice sermon and paid tribute to the soldiers from the village who had fallen in France and Flanders: the brothers Harold and Robert Robinson, and Arthur and John Ward, Fred Cowen Slack and Frank Suter. They were the names on the war memorial outside my window — there on the village green close to the spot on which, in past years, the carols have been sung. For some reason that I cannot describe, listening to a schoolboy read out that roll call of doomed youth made me feel even more part of the village from which those young men went to war. Main Street has not changed much since their last Christmas here.
So may it long continue and, as Tiny Tim would have said, God Bless Us Every One.
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