NORMANDY SPIRIT

Last weekend I went to Normandy, again. I say again for I have been there before to stay with old friends who live just outside Le Havre and blogged about it in this space, as they say in the newspapers. Just a quick visit, there and back, but a welcome breath of fresh air and a chance to see new sights.

Normandy is often held to be a poor relation to French provinces further to the south or west. It is the place that one hurries through after disembarking from a rough Channel crossing and hurrying towards Paris or Nantes. Perhaps it is slightly more romantic than Picardy through which one hurries even faster unless one is homesick for grey skies and stops to look in at Amiens or Arras.

Indeed, from a tourist perspective, one could imagine Normandy as a kind of Middle Class province, looking down on Picardy to the north, but looking up to Brittany to its west, though perhaps the Bretons themselves would never understand the allusion as they labour firmly under the belief that they are looked down upon by the rest of France to whom they feel themselves attached only in the most fragile manner.

Normandy of course is a province of two halves - lower and upper divided by the Seine. My friend, Chantal, who so kindly put me up this weekend and who has lived in Normandy all her life, hisses that upper Normandy is not really Normandy at all despite boasting the birthplace of William the Conqueror and the town with the shortest name in France - Eu.

Only when you cross the Seine are you in what she would regard as Normandy proper - the Normandy of the picture postcard, all dappled cows and orchards full of apple laden trees at this time of year. Thatched farmhouses, abound - all pleasingly shaped to delight the eye and almost like the orchards themselves with their vertical timber framing springing at angles from the ground to bury itself under the thatch.

Their visual beauty lifts the spirit, particularly when the houses are covered in flowers as so many of them are and when there are no ugly visual intrusions - modern concrete structures, or garish advertising - that it seems we in Britain have no control over and which most people do not even seem to notice.

We stopped in Gatteville (Eure) - there is more than one - to look at the small remains of an eleventh century castle, built by one of the Normans who crossed the Channel with William but didn’t immediately take to the grey weather of Sussex. After doing his bit at Hastings, William sent him (I’m afraid I have forgotten his name) home with a grant of land on which to build a castle and here was its remains.

I would have taken its photograph had I remembered my camera, which sadly I didn’t, and I would have photographed, too the beautiful farmhouse that sat next to it, long and low with a great overhanging roof at one end that sheltered an overhanging staircase. I am told this is known as a ‘Jay’s Bottom’ - but why is another matter.

When I did recover my camera, it was only to show that the weather was no better there than here, as you can see from the ship.

RAIN OR SHINE: A WINTER'S TALE

Of course it should have been a balmy summer evening, the sun sinking slowly into a furnace of copper, chilled Pinot Grigio on the Castle terrace and a light zephyr breathing the warm balm of Sicilia over the assembled company. But that was asking too much.

We motored over last Saturday evening to Goodrich Castle, a lovely old pile in South Herefordshire, built of that peculiar purple-ish sandstone they go in for in those parts, for the specific purpose of getting a good soaking and incidentally to watch the Rain and Shine Theatre Company perform Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. As they say on the quiz shows: the clue is in the title.

Rain and Shine are an excellent troupe who perform Shakespeare and other classical plays in a rumbustious, burlesque, street theatre-ish style. Lots of noise, lots of clever and comic ‘business,’ deliberately hammy acting and audience involvement: on Saturday, the actors (well, two of them) fancying a drop of wine during the performance, simply helped themselves to the remains of someone’s picnic, for instance. Well worth seeing if you get the chance; more: well worth going an hour’s drive to see. Even in the rain. Even when the rain itself was over-acting, assisted by its fellow meteorological thesps: darkness and a half-gale.

I had never before seen The Winter's Tale, so this was a first for me, and, given the generally humid ambiance, not one I am likely to forget. I rather enjoyed it, I have to say - though it’s a curious piece, starting as it does as a serious tragedy all about how a man’s jealousy can ruin lives and marital harmony. But then, after King Leontes has caused his infant daughter (who he believes not to be his) to be abandoned far from the shores of his Kingdom of Sicilia, for which his faithful servant is then attacked by a bear so letting Shakespeare write his most famous stage direction ‘Exit pursued by a Bear,’ the play switches to comedy. Well, it has to really, otherwise the whole thing would become too silly, and the rest of the piece is a comedy with music, dance and song. Shakespeare as Lloyd Webber, you might say.

Leontes, even gets his beloved wife back whom, he cast into prison where she dies in the meantime of the false accusations hurled at her. Someone thoughtfully makes a life size statue of her, which then comes to life when Leontes takes responsibility for his terrible behaviour and she, dutifully and in a triumph of hope over experience, accepts him again as husband.

I did, I confess, as the rain started to descend in stair rods during the last half hour, wish that that final scene would quickly draw to a close so that we could all go home. "Yes, we know the statue is real!" I wanted to say, "so you can skip the gradual warming up bit." Warming up! Everyone was frozen. Hermione (the statue) I would have thought especially, standing stock still as she was in the rain soaked gale for half an hour with only a wispy tunic to protect her.

Camped on the wet grass I noticed we were sitting next to a seventeenth century mortar called Roaring Meg. A squat, tubby black thing resembling an iron toad. It had been cast locally when the Parliamentary commander besieging the Royalists of Goodrich in 1646 began to lose patience at their defiance. So with Meg’s helped he lobbed a few 200lb gunpowder filled shells into the castle and the walls, in true Biblical style, came tumbling down. Or so the notice said.

I couldn't help thinking, watching the droplets of rain swirling on the wind like snowflakes in the luminescence of the spotlights, that the play might even have been performed before, in this same castle courtyard or in the adjacent hall, in happier times, before Roaring Meg (why are cannons always female?) brought the great castle towers tumbling down.

I can't think of another country, other than Britain, where the company would be shown the same spirit - not only of 'The Show Must Go On' but also of 'The Show Must Be Watched.' Only when I started drying out did I discover how wet I was.

But as it ended and we stood to applaud the bravura of the cast and they applauded us in turn for our determination to stay to the end, and we packed up and waded back the long quarter mile in the muddy darkness to the car park, cold and soaked, I knew I was glad to have gone. There is more to theatre than ice cream in the warm trappings of the grand circle.

OH, THE POWER OF THE REMOTE CONTROL

A week or two back a card dropped through the letterbox. It came from BARB - the British Audience Research Bureau telling me that someone would come calling unless, that is, I minded terribly. And yesterday a big bushy bearded fellow arrived, with suitable identification and laptop to see whether our household might be one worthy of joining the great mysterious panel that so accurately reflects the nation that whatever they watch or listen to may be multiplied by some tens of thousands to tell us the total size of the audience for the ten o’clock news or whatever.

All fiendishly clever. What happens, apparently, if you join the panel is that some magic box of tricks is installed next to your TV. This monitors remotely whatever it is you are watching and then, come the end of the day, sends it down the telephone line or by wireless to some base station somewhere. I’m a bit vague about this bit as if we are accepted on the panel we shall be at first on some sort of reserve list and only be moved on to the proper thing when a vacancy (for the species of work-from-home, pensionable household that we are, presumably) arises. Only at that time will we therefore get to see the wizard box of tricks.

There is some compensation for this invasion of privacy, though it seems pretty trivial - a few vouchers for the house - so we shall have to wait and see whether the whole schemozzle turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth. Anyway, I shall now be rewarded by a feeling of great power, knowing that in making my decision about whether to watch Midsomer Murders while doing the ironing I may be speaking for ten thousand other households and therefore can, by my choices, help to keep a programme on air. Or alternatively, extinguish it altogether.

*****

August is normally a pretty quiet month chez nous. I have some free time to walk and potter in the garden. Not so this year, however. I was to have directed Peter Shaffer’s play ‘Lettice and Lovage’ for our little theatre company this autumn. Sadly, my leading lady has had to pull out and there is no one else available to take over the role. The play has already been postponed once. It has now been advertised. The only thing I could do therefore was to take on the part myself.

So my free time in August is going into learning the role of Lettice - a role originally crated for Maggie Smith. It is a quite brilliant virtuoso piece, which I shall enjoy playing, once the lines are learnt, that is. The story concerns an eccentric guide who embellishes history to make it more interesting for her tourists and from this starting point the play goes on to make a protest against modernism in all its forms, but particularly in architecture. Although a comedy, it is essentially a play about loss and about seeking refuge from a hateful present in the fantasy of the past.

People who are not actors often have strange ideas about lines. ‘Oh I could never, ever, possibly, learn all that, they say,’ when they contemplate the 53 pages of the play most of which is either Lettice on stage by herself or with one other person. But learning lines is not that difficult. We learn all lines everyday when we hear a song or listen to someone speaking. Once is often all it takes to be able to repeat a key phrase or punchline. We all know, I should think, almost enough lines from Dad’s army to put together a respectable paragraph of script. ‘We’re all doomed!’ ‘Don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring!’ ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ and so on. It’s surprising what we know that we don’t know we know - to use what has to be called now, I suppose, a Rumpsteadism.

So learning lines is not difficult. It is simply a matter of repetition and with each repetition a little more sticks in the memory. Of course, one is not learning unconnected words - as from a telephone directory - but sentiments, opinions, responses. When you really know a part you no longer had to remember lines because you come out with the words automatically in the right situations. The lines become a part of you as much as perhaps ‘Hello, how are you today?’ is a part of you when you meet a neighbour in the street.

Anyway it is time to go a-learning once more. A quick half hour before and during my morning tea break. Then back again to the office to chase recalcitrant label customers.

WHO AMONGST US IS A TROUT?

Why are robust and curmudgeonly older women called 'trouts?' This has always struck me as a very strange quirk of language, the trout being as near to a sexless beast as it is possible to come this side of the molluscs and one that is actually rather timid to boot. If one were looking for a female piscean, armed with stout hat and umbrella, intent on putting watery public officials in their place, surely Pike would be a better species to pick on than Trout? But nevertheless ‘trout’ wins by a mile. Whence comes this usage, I wonder?

But why should I be asking at all, I hear you murmuring from your comfortable position in the hammock, glass of Pimm’s beside you and a light novel open across your lap?
“Because,” says I, envying this mythical land of perpetual August sunshine with the hazy drone of lawn mowing only just audible above the birdsong, “that was the word used the other day in a Times review to describe the character played by the wonderful Eileen Atkins - the stalwart but decrepit Lady Tressilian - in Kevin Elyot's adaptation of one of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories on the television last Sunday. And that set me thinking.

Despite my asking, no-one seems to know from where this odd usage of the word trout comes. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable does not even mention ‘trout,’ and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is no help either.

There is a deep crevasse between the animals to which at various times and in various places we have aspired to be and the reality of who we are. We all have our favourites - I see myself as a racing hare, wild and fancy free, bounding over ditches, ears laid back and a coat of hair groomed to perfection by the wind. You, on the other hand, may picture me as a tedious variety of beetle or even a cow with hatstand horns. Still, while some of us might choose to be that King of Fish, the salmon, racing up waterfalls with the same energy that lesser beings reserve for the New Year Sales, few, I think, would voluntarily choose to be labelled a ‘trout.’

Alec Guiness used, apparently, to imagine the character he was preparing as an animal and then play that animal. He once demonstrated this on a chat show by turning himself into an elephant. A half bend of the back, a slight shake of the shoulders, a look, the slow raising of a leg - and there, in motion, was an Indian teak elephant. But what animal, I am still asking, would he choose to represent a stalwart matron or, for that matter, the chronic churl or buffer? Or do we have no option but to accept ‘trout?’

Powerful and determined women may look like many members of the animal kingdom, but not surely fish? Even in old age fish are sleek and wrinkle free, which despite fortunes spent chez L’Oreal or Laboratoires Garnier, is something few of us can claim to be. Real trout also emit no sound, unlike their human namesakes, nor organise jumble sales for the Red Cross and pronounce on morals.

Perhaps the word is anyway now falling into desuetude; a consequence of the feminist advance. In childhood I remember the word being applied regularly by my step-mother to those who had offended her in some way. Thankfully women can stand up for themselves today without attracting negative comment, whether from men or indeed other women.

Certainly ‘trout’ has a Blandings Castle, 1930s, feel to it, which is probably why it was the Times critic's word of choice to describe Eileen Atkins’ arresting cameo performance of Laddy Tressilian - the dying old matriarch (who nevertheless contrives to get herself murdered - this being Miss Marple after all) lying abed all day, chain-smoking cheroots, while issuing quasi-military orders to the household and listening to the beguiling conversations among her guests that chanced conveniently to drift through her open window. “Oh what does it matter?” she croaks irritably. We shall all be dead come September.”

I suspect, though, that even in real life Eileen Atkins would not mind particularly if people thought she was a ‘trout.’ She is not afraid to say what she thinks, particular when it comes to the guidance of young girls. Earlier this summer she condemned in no uncertain terms the laddish behaviour of young women who believe feminism is about aping the heavy drinking and sexual habits of their male counterparts.

"My skin crawls when I see laddish women presenting television shows who almost slap their thighs as if they're in panto," she is reported to have said said. "I think, 'Stop. This isn't what we meant by feminism.' It's gone completely wrong.” At the price of becoming a trout myself I say amen to that.