MOOD SWINGS

The woman running the Chiropractic stall at the Frome Green Fair asked me to wait.  This was disappointing; the stall was advertising free spinal examinations and I could see several people lying on couches while earnest practitioners fingered their tops and their bottoms.

At the adjacent stall I recognised the statuesque herbalist selling preparations in little brown bottles. We had met two years ago when she had led a herbal walk along the Frome river during which she so memorably described the benefits of comfrey for those with sprained ankles that I had immediately procured a root and rushed home to plant it.

I wanted to ask now whether she had anything for backs - but as I had yet to have my free examination that seemed premature. So what should it be? Did I have dark moments? A tincture for the nerves perhaps? A preparation to help me sleep? Something to tone me up?  Eventually we settled on the stomach and she handed over a preparation labelled 'For the Digestion' containing a ferociously revolting mixture of Wormwood, Rosemary and Bay, one teaspoonful to be taken in water ten minutes before eating.

Our conversation about the intricacies of my digestive tract was cut short, however, by a beckoning signal from the Chiropractors. They bid me to sit, upright and sideways, on a small wooden chair, with my head up and spine straight as though I were back in the deportment class.  An elderly gentleman then began to rummage in my hair feeling, he said, for depressions on the sides of my skull.

Now, I can't find any such depressions, but he managed somehow to find holes like eye sockets, as though my head had once been bolted on. “Can you feel” he said, “that these aren't level?”

Well, no, I couldn’t really. And I challenge anyone to judge whether someone else's fingers pressed somewhere behind your skull are level or not. He rummaged in my hair again and massaged my neck.

It was as he thought, he said, shaking his head. My skull, apparently, has a permanent list, for which my top neck vertebra has had to compensate by twisting in the other direction. Then he produced a disturbing replica of a human spine, the bones gleaming in white plastic with rubbery little yellow nerves emerging from every crack.

Did I feel fuzzy in the morning, wake up with a cricked neck, get occasional headaches? he asked.

“Well, yes,” I said. Though if I am honest this is not always unconnected with what I had to eat or drink the night before.

He asked me to lie down and traced his fingers along my spine until he reached my buttocks, which he shook gently. I wondered if he was going to say that they too were listing to port, but he pronounced them straight, but only because my lumbar vertebrae did a sort of ‘Z’ bend on the way down. Had I fallen out of a tree in childhood, had a riding accident; some incapacitating illness perhaps?

I told him that I probably had succumbed to most of these at one time or another. Indeed, I remembered when as children we dared each other to jump out of the high hayloft and recalled the eye-watering thud we made on hitting the ground.

His soothing voice broke through these recollections: all could be corrected by simple manipulation if I would only make an appointment. Not previously having noticed a problem with either a tilting head or listing buttocks, I said I would give the matter careful consideration.

But now as I wandered through the eclectic range of green stalls promoting everything from solar heating to justice for Palestine, I could think only of my head in perpetual tilt and a ‘Z’ bend in my spine. I started to imagine all those muscles pulling against each other to keep me upright and possibly about to cause their cavalier and feckless owner some real gyp.

That evening I went to a party. ‘Just a few friends, a few drinks’ my hostess had said. Everyone was sipping Cava, but I was tired after driving and didn’t feel like drinking. So I found a champagne flute, filled it with straw-coloured apple and elderflower and just pretended; all the while thinking morosely of the happy froth of the green fair. Then someone started a karaoke!

I retreated indoors where a few men had huddled around a small television to watch the World Cup final. But it was no use, I could feel waves of depression mounting, which the football refused to distract. So I put my glass down, found the back door and without a word slipped soundlessly out into the night. Maybe I should have bought something for my nerves, after all.

THE PRACTICE FUNERAL

I'm the sort of person who always worries when the fridge door is shut whether the light inside may still be on. The other day I attended a rather dreary funeral in a rather dreary crematorium. Outside the weather was hot and sunny; inside the eulogies droned on. I could hardly make out one word: bad acoustics on the crematorium's part; bad hearing on mine. My febrile mind started to drift....... what really was in the coffin............?


“I think,” said Fiona Summers to her friend Daniella White, “that I shall have a practice funeral. The doctor doesn’t seem to think I shall live very long and in the circumstances it seems a shame to miss a good party.”

“But, Fiona, it wouldn’t be a good party - not without you - we should all be extremely sad. Besides I am quite sure that you won’t die for a long time. In fact you are looking quite well.”

“Oh I intend it to be a good party. That’s why I plan to be present,” said Fiona archly. “Funerals can be such dismal affairs and if the bereaved are not sufficiently saddened by the loss of their loved one then contemplation of the undertaker’s bill soon sets that to rights. If you are going to spend that amount of money then you might as well ensure that you are around to enjoy the party. It’s also the only time that your friends and relatives are likely to say agreeable things about you, so it would be a shame to miss it.”

“But you can’t expect your husband to organise a practice funeral for his wife, can you?” asked Fiona. “The police might get to hear of it and he might be arrested on suspicion of helping you to die or something.”

“Indeed not!” replied Fiona. “Besides James could never organise anything even himself. No, I was rather hoping you would help me. You’ve directed many amateur plays with the drama group and a funeral is just a play in three acts: the church, the internment and the wake.”

Daniella gulped. She had wondered why Fiona had been so insistent that she come to lunch that day.

“I’ll write the script, of course.” continued Fiona. “We shan’t have any of those dreary hymns. Nor any of that ‘time to be born and time to die’ nonsense. No, I want a thoroughly modern funeral, that people want to come to because it will be a good show. Not to pay respect to my dead body. Then we’ll have something to talk about afterwards at the party. I can forgive people if they don’t remember me, but not if they don’t remember my funeral. So we shall want to get it right.”

“Really, Fiona! You’re not serious!?”

“Oh but I am! I have always envied Ophelia her funeral. After all two young men fighting over you in the grave would certainly liven up any internment proceedings. Do you think health and safety would let us do it with swords? I could lie upon a gravestone in a flimsy white dress with waterweed in my hair and people could take photographs and make speeches. What do you think? And then I could come to life again, as it were, at the wake.”

“No priest would ever allow that sort of thing in his church. He’d think it pagan.”

“Ah, yes, they’re so terribly hidebound, aren’t they? No imagination. There’s the Bible full of miracles and resurrections, of coats of many colours and people being swallowed by whales - but all we get are grey-faced men in cassocks and an interminable succession of Sundays after Trinity. Let’s do it then in the early morning.”

“Let’s do what in the early morning, exactly?”

“The me-lying-on-a-gravestone in my floaty white dress with waterweed in my hair while folk fight over my grave.”

“Folk? How many do you envisage?”

“Well, Ophelia only had two. But I am sure you can do better than that. Couldn’t you arrange something with those battle re-enactment people? There was a half-decent Civil War battle at St Fagans - I’m sure some of that must have spilled over into the church yard. To die horribly in the midst of a Civil war re-enactment sounds rather better at the foot of one’s obituary than to be terminated by some awful medical condition.”

“But hardly peaceful,” observed Daniella doubtfully.

“Who said endings should be peaceful? That’s just a convention. So that’s settled then. We shall have all the ceremonial in the early morning. You will bring me into the church - half-drowned and we shall have some rousing music and drama - West Side Story perhaps - and in between you can even say what a bad person I was.

“Bad person?”

“Oh yes!” Why speak only good of the dead if they are not around to hear you? Might as well give them the full works. So long as folk aren’t boring, anything is permissible. I mean that’s what we do at weddings, isn’t it? The Best Man and the Father of the Bride compete to tell the guests the true nature of the partner to whom they have just become unaccountably hitched by the grey man in the white cassock now drinking your champagne. We could do the same.

"In fact I shall declare you, Daniella, my Best Man - or rather Woman - and you can slander me to your heart’s content. If I really don’t like what you say I shall drown you out at once with a rousing chorus of ‘America’ on the organ.

“And then I shall be carried out and laid in the earth, below a spreading chestnut tree and a volley of muskets fired over my head to keep the spirits away. I shall take a few things with me for the journey. Some wine and cheese would be useful and some costume jewellery and heels, just in case I meet a passing spirit on the way. Do you think there’s sex in the afterlife? After all it would be something worth knowing. Then we can all go into the nearby pub and have a rousing funeral breakfast.

“Breakfast? Aren’t funerals generally in the afternoon?”

“My funeral will be in the early morning,” announced Fiona in a tone that brooked no countermanding. “And afterwards we shall have a really great party. We shall start with an egg, bacon and black pudding fry-up and move swiftly on to champagne. I shall try to move around incognito just to check whether you are really saying nice things about me. Anyway, think about next June, if I am still around. Now I really must dash. I have to go in for chemo at two.”

Sadly, Fiona wasn’t around next June for her practice funeral for she died peacefully, if unexpectedly, on 31st May. Nevertheless, Daniella had followed her instructions to the letter and a few days later the early morning practice funeral was ready to be staged to Fiona’s own personal script.

But a question now arose as to whether to proceed with the practice funeral now that the poor soul was actually dead. Those of her friends who knew her best - and who anyway had a starring role in the bizarre proceedings - were all for keeping to the schedule on the good theatrical principle that the show must always go on. Others, who included many of Fiona’s older family, were appalled that any such thing could be contemplated and insisted on reacquainting themselves with The Rev. Solomon Dreary of the local crematorium.

“That’s not what Fiona wanted,” pleaded Daniella.

“But, it’s the proper thing and, more importantly it’s what I want,” observed Fiona’s Mother, imperiously.

Daniella could see that the Civil War re-enacters might no longer be needed. There was an incipient Civil War in the family which could turn easily enough into fisticuffs at the graveside.

“I suppose we shall just have to have the practice funeral without the deceased,” concluded Daniella to James. Everything has been booked and we can’t just not turn up now. But it will be Hamlet without the Prince.”

“Or rather Hamlet without Orphelia,” said James, who had been a doubtful supporter of the practice funeral while Fiona had been alive but who had become its most ardent supporter now that she was actually dead.

“I suppose we couldn’t just kidnap her?” he suggested enigmatically. “Kind of ‘borrow’ her for a few hours from the undertakers. They’re a large firm and I’m sure they have so many dead bodies in coffins that they wouldn’t miss one for a few hours. We could then dress her in her white and floaty robes and get her to the church in time to lay her on the gravestone.”

“But how would you move her? You couldn’t very well walk around with a coffin under your arm - or even a coffin in your little hatchback.”

John thought. “We’ll walk her”, he said suddenly. “We’ll take her out of the coffin and with you on one side and me on the other it would just look as though we were returning from a rather good party. No one notices anything anyway in the early morning. Anyone who is up is half-asleep and anyway too busy listening to the dawn chorus.”

Daniella felt that the idea of strolling nonchalantly to her funeral as though from an all night party was one that Fiona would thoroughly have approved.

“But afterwards?” she asked. “We couldn’t very well tip her into the ground and return an empty coffin.”

“Why not?” said John, a malicious twinkle in his eye. “Of course, the coffin won’t be entirely empty. I know a friendly farmer who always seems to have fallen stock that needs incinerating. He’d be very glad of a free cremation. And I’m sure that to the crematorium ovens a dead calf would be all in a days work.

And so it was arranged. On a beautiful and cloudless summer morning Fiona was liberated from her coffin and, supported by Daniella and James, brought carefully through the lych gate and into the churchyard. She was dressed in her best Ophelia frock and James had entangled strands of supermarket watercress in her hair. Her real friends - those whom she loved and who had loved her - were all waiting, crowded around, cameras clicking.

If her feet were dragging and her face were pale (despite Daniella’s best efforts with stage powder) then let it generally be known that she had fallen into the river while gathering flowers for her Prince. She even held a bunch of buttercups, hurriedly picked, in her cold fingers. Willing hands picked her up and laid her on the flat tombstone near the spreading chestnut tree, through whose branches the early sunlight fell dappled onto the grass.

In the night someone had thoughtfully dug a grave, though whether the authorities had been informed of this was doubtful.

Suddenly pandemonium erupted all around. The churchyard was filled with smoke as from all sides there seemed to come musket fire and the shouts of angry men. Someone discharged an artillery piece and clouds of white smoke obscured the mourners, if such they where, from the graveside.

John was saying his last goodbyes. Fiona’s children were weeping. At last there was hush. Daniella imagined she could hear her old friend saying, ‘Oh do just get one with it' and Fiona was bundled, a little unceremoniously, into the gaping earth. Then a sergeant in helmet and leather jerkin drew up what remained of his raggle-taggle actors and three volleys of musket fire rang out again over the grave.

Everyone applauded. Even Fiona, Daniella imagined. What a send-off!

Events had now to be concluded at a fast pace if the party were to avoid detection. Earth was bundled onto the grave, the ground levelled and turf put back. John planted Fiona’s bouquet of buttercups. Suddenly, all that was left were a few strands of watercress, which Daniella thought that she might turn into soup.

A short-time later John collected a half grown Friesian bullock calf which had conveniently succumbed the previous day and arranged it comfortably in the coffin, which he and Daniella then returned to its bier at the undertakers.

By the time they got back the party in the pub was in full swing. Though the eggs and bacon were long finished, several bottles of champagne remained. Everybody was relaxed and happy. The photographs, taken against the rising sun, looked tremendously ethereal.

All good things come to an end, however, Daniella reflected. Even Fiona. And she would need to get herself home and change. She had, she remembered, to attend the sad and dreary funeral of a bullock calf later in the day.

Story Copyright Fennie Somerville 2010

A BROKEN PLATE

We had finished our staged reading of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ on the lawn of the big village garden. To the south far in front of us a full moon hung in the southern skies over the hills of Exmoor, just visible away on the horizon. The midsummer night was closing in. Some of our small audience had bidden their farewells, others were helping to clear away the tables and screens we had used for the set and with them went the elegant cups and saucers that always figure in plays of the Victorian era. It had been a good evening.

Then came a crash in the gathering gloom. Our poor chairman, who despite playing the 35 year old Jack Worthing has a problem with his knees, had slipped and one of my porcelain plates took the moment as its chance to abscond from the tray with the remnants of the cucumber sandwiches. After a short moment of joyfully turning somersaults in mid-air, retribution beckoned in the shape of the stone terrace below; and the plate was then no more. The cucumber sandwiches, fortunately, were more resilient.

Both he and his wife were mortified for this was - or rather had been - a Royal Doulton plate, all gold leaf and ultramarine. But I was unconcerned. We never actually used these pretty plates, which were really too small for anything but cucumber sandwiches cut crustless and bijou.

“It came from my mother,” I said looking at the shards, which of course was the wrong thing to say.

What I had meant was that the plate (one of a set of twelve plates and matching teacups - but sadly with no matching teapot) had been in my mother’s possession, though I can’t remember her ever using them.

They lived in the bottom of the great oak ‘court cupboard’ that her second husband had claimed as part of his own personal war reparations and brought back from Berlin in 1945. The cupboard today graces our dining room and the plates, when not needed for theatrical productions, continue to sit on its bottom shelf.

They may have come to her from my grandmother, for they belong to that far away epoch of parasols and teas on lawns; those Lady Bracknell days when one did in fact need a tea service for twelve and had a butler to serve it too. As my grandmother was born in India (thereby giving me a qualification if India should ever need another member for its tiddly-winks team) and grew up with the Raj, this is possibly whence they came.

So what I meant was that these plates were therefore just lumber that simply occupied cupboard space as decade rolled into decade. But of course my throwaway remark was taken to indicate that this was some priceless heirloom that had been lost and that as a result the whole tea service was now valueless.

I had intended to mend the broken plate with china glue. Porcelain is forgiving in this regard, though in the event a small shard was missing. So a century perhaps after its Stoke creation and a voyage to and fro around the world, I slipped the remaining pieces into a carrier bag and put them in the dustbin. I still had eleven plates, I mused, and at this rate of breakage, would still be able to provide tea for two come the next millennium.

By then fashions may have changed again for the Doulton teacups only have the capacity to satisfy (I imagine) if one were wearing a Victorian corset, laced by a particularly vindictive maid of Amazonian proportions. They hold enough tea for perhaps three or four genteel little sips, whereas I prefer my tea in a half-pint mug.

Neither were such highly decorated tea services designed for the abrasive lavage of that most essential of domestic utilities - a dishwasher, without which life today would be quite intolerable.

What can go into the dishwasher, though, is Bridgewater, whose sale started this week with a special sneak preview for members. We have Bridgewater pottery coming out of our ears, the rarer editions of which, much to our surprise, are actually quite valuable. Still I couldn’t resist buying another pasta dish and a small mug in the old Indian Hen design. Amazingly, the order had been processed and the goods picked, packed, shipped and delivered in exactly 23 hours. Which, in these days of desperate inefficiency, must be something of a record.

Yet that wasn’t our only ceramic delivery. For our Chairman and his wife called to present another - a plate to replace that which had been broken. Royal Albert, this time, about the same size and most, most lovely. A really beautiful plate and a really beautiful thought from really beautiful people.

PEST CONTROL

When I left the house with my bag of parcels to post, the thermometer outside the front door was struggling to reach the temperature deemed suitable for sickrooms. ‘Chambres des Malades’ it says.

Though the thermometer was probably made in China it is modelled on a French creation. This appeals to whimsical people like me who want to know at what temperature we should keep any visitors who may fall ill, or for that matter any orange trees that might just happen to be overwintering in the conservatory. So on the advice of the thermometer I kept my pullover on, despite the afternoon sun beating down outside. Maybe it reads low. Anyway I was soon too hot.

Dave was wearing a sun-hat and shorts. His wife has a debilitating illness and he’s often about when I make this afternoon trip to town. He looks askance at the pullover.

“Cold-blooded,” I say.

“How’s business?” he asks.

“Slow,” I reply.

“Why’s that?” he inquires.

“Oooh - recession, World Cup, Wimbledon, the hot weather, anxiety over the budget. Pick any two from five.”

“Ah!” he says, knowingly. “Ah!”

“But it will pick up,” I say. “Swings and roundabouts, ups and downs.”

The next day I have exactly the same conversation with George who sits on the same Government Committee as me. We were having lunch at the excellent Deli in Marks and Spencer.

I am far more concerned for him than I am for myself. He presides over a quango whose English counterpart is in line to be axed shortly. We may both find ourselves with more time on our hands than we should like. I took a glass of Cava to arm myself against the future. “Have you thought about pest control, I asked?”

Now, I was alerted to the money-spinning potential of pest control just the other day following the latest round of complaints about mice in our theatre. It’s not a big theatre and most of the time there’s no-one there. This makes it attractive to the youth of the neighbourhood, with whom we fight an attritional war of security, and mice. Though it’s not so much the mice we object to - they are expert in removing crumbs trodden into the carpet - as the calling cards they leave behind and inevitably in the most public places.

I have often thought that a small mutation leading a mouse to bury its droppings would bring considerable evolutionary advantage to the species Mus musculus. But until that time there’s the pest control man, whose help we were persuaded to solicit just the other day.

Now I’ve had no direct experience of pest control to date but it doesn’t seem a bad business to be in. Little is required by way of start up; a van with sides decorated with suitably ferocious rodents, perhaps, and some trays in which to lay bait. You then advertise your services and wait confidently for the telephone to ring.

When it does, you walk knowledgeably around your customer’s premises looking for evidence of rodent presence. You shake your head and mutter about the dire calamities, commercial and medical, that will inevitably befall you without expert help. Finally, you make recommendations and hand out fact sheets, culled either from common sense or from the Internet.

Having thoroughly frightened your customer with visions of being closed down and hauled before the Bench with sundry polythene bags of mouse-droppings given in evidence, you suggest that such a nightmare might be conveniently be avoided by a single renewable contract, payable in advance.

Then you lay down your trays of bait, purchased from any reputable agricultural establishment and move swiftly to cash the cheque. The mice disappear - for a time anyway - and your customer recommends you for good service. The fact that everything that you have done could have been done by the customer had he stopped a moment or two to think about it, never seems to occur to him.

Such were my thoughts as I stripped ivy from the theatre wall as our recently contracted Pest Control man had suggested. A convenient let out, I thought, because it was almost impossible to get all the ivy off the wall or out of the roof. If the mice came back, as they would, then he could blame the ivy, or, in other words, me.

Of the two parts of the operation then, being the Pest Control man seemed to involve being rewarded handsomely for little actual physical work; whereas being a customer involved an afternoon of precious time hacking away in the hot sun at age old ivy, blunting your saw and secateurs and probably doing your back in at the same time, and for no money at all. Like my thermometer, something didn’t seem right somewhere.

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT

I had walked down this leafy Wolvercote road several times with my aunt.  Each time, according to my child’s memory, it had been sunny and each time the bindweed had been growing over the black granite monument on the bridge.

I suppose I must have been at that golden age that arrives with learning to read and ends with the rigor mortis of serious schooling.  When you can let attentive adults attend comfortably to your wants and life is a never-ending holiday of exploration.

My stepmother, who was a bit of a tartar, described bindweed as pernicious and stripped it away with violence.  I thought this rather sad, for I loved the big, white, waxy flowers.  So did my aunt, who called them ‘Fairy Bells.’  We were entirely in tune, she and I, on the matter and we might have been content to live in a green space with walls papered by these sunny flowers with their drooping, arrow-shaped leaves.

We pushed away the encroaching curtain of vine stems and saw again on the plaque of black granite the ancient aeroplane that had crashed on nearby Port Meadow in 1912, killing its two pilots.  

It was my father who first took me here. I expect on the way to the Trout Inn at Godstow, then a more primitive and bucolic establishment than it was later to become.  Just another river pub in fact, where he and my step-mother went sometimes in the early evening, and where I became bored with my insipid orange juice and fractious at the lack of visible trout.

I doubt he took me there a second time. But when my aunt - or I should say my great aunt - started to take me out on empty Saturday afternoons I would ask her to take me to Wolvercote to see the little bridge and the granite monument and the ‘Fairy Bells.’ 

We’d catch the number 4 bus up the broad Woodstock Road, she demanding of the conductor in her best Edith Evans voice: “one and a half to the terminus, please.” We always sat on the upper-deck, if possible in the front seats, bouncing and swaying on top of the world. Auntie and me: off to another adventure on a maroon and green Oxford bus.

She would have been in her early sixties.  And yet I cannot remember a time when she wasn’t ‘old,’ or ‘elderly’ as she preferred to describe herself;  (as a child I am not sure I knew the difference), and generally we got on well.  Indeed I would have preferred to have lived with her rather than my icy step-mother with whom I seemed always locked in tempestuous conflict.  

With Auntie the rules of good, or at least of satisfactory, behaviour were few; neither were they difficult to learn. Besides, if you transgressed the sin was soon forgotten. I knew she welcomed my company, particularly as she lived alone.  This was not the case in my step-mother's household.

So we would run up to friendly Wolvercote and then walk slowly - for in addition to being ‘old’ Auntie suffered from perpetual rheumatism - towards Godstow and its ruined abbey where the beautiful Rosamund Clifford, mistress of Henry II, lay buried.  

Maybe Auntie knew this.  If so she certainly would not have told me, for she never quite seemed to understand sexual lust nor would she forgive the scrapes and scandals that have befallen our incontinent Royalty down the ages.

Or maybe she did; even so she never managed to fall far enough off the impossible perch of her own high Victorian principles of ‘proper’ behaviour to lead to any sort of relationship. She never married, still less had children, leaving that unspoken-about side of life to her sister, who did marry, had one child (my father) and then died. 

Auntie had then stepped in to run the bereaved household and assumed that this life would continue with her as dowager when my father transacted a succession of two hasty marriages in the heady days of wartime and its aftermath.  But both wives in their turn threw her out.  A little unkindly, I thought. 

So now her liberal attentions turned on me.  I was in any case too young for tales of kings and and mistresses and anyway far more impressed by a more vivid history of crashing aeroplanes.  Perhaps it was here, on the bridge over the Thames, that I resolved to learn to fly which, after a fashion, I eventually did.  But not before I built several model aeroplanes that looked like the one on the monument and which showed an equal propensity to fall suddenly and disastrously to earth.

Still, having paid our afternoon homage to piloting and bindweed, we would wander back to the sleepy village for a cornet of ice cream and maybe we would share a pot of tea.  Then, there would be the bus, waiting at its terminus in the dusty lane, with the conductor shouting to us to climb aboard. 

A BRUSH WITH HISTORY

I read in the paper the other day that we are living through a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus. What this means I am not quite sure. It is a rare event and possibly beneficial, so the paper says. It started on 8 June and ends sometime next January, so I am on the look-out. Three herons flew over the house yesterday in formation, so you never know.

What I do know is that orders for our little business are becoming slower. Instead of half a dozen parcels to ship out each day, we are lucky to have one or two. This may have something to do with the triple conjunction (though if it has we shall be broke by next January). Or it may have something to do with the rather less astral World Cup, in which case things may be back to normal a little sooner.

Anyway, these things need to pondered so I took myself off yesterday to the beautifully peaceful grounds of St Quentin’s castle, less than a mile from where we live. The past always helps to put the present in perspective

Although the Castle’s crag above the river Thaw has always been fortified, the ruins that you see today were begun some 700 years ago on the orders of Gilbert de Clare, aged then about 19 and the last male de Clare left. Well, of course you want to build castles at that age, don’t you? What’s more Gilbert even had the wherewithal to stock them with real soldiers.

How much or how little he was involved personally in the building of St Quentin’s we don’t know. (The Castle is named after the Norman Lord who had built some wooden fortifications here in the 12th century). It’s a small castle as castles go (but then there’s not a lot of room on the crag) and just the sort of castle that a nineteen year old might commission.

So, having set the building in motion, Gilbert then went off to join Edward II’s army en route to relieve Stirling Castle. But happily or unhappily, depending from which side of the border your ancestors hail, there was a little skirmish at Bannockburn during which Edward’s army was routed and poor Gilbert was killed. That was in 1314 and before he had managed to sire legitimate offspring of his own. Exit the de Clare line.

As a result they didn’t bother finishing St Quentin’s. There’s a respectable twin towered gatehouse all ready for a portcullis and a drawbridge but nothing much beyond. Still go through the gatehouse and you arrive in an elegant bailey surrounded by curtain wall 5 metres thick in some places but considerably thinner in others. The works appear to have run out of money and then been finished off as quickly and cheaply as possible.

That didn’t matter - for there is no record of the castle being attacked, or defended. It withstood no siege guns or sappers' tunnels. No Maids Marian were held in dungeons waiting to be rescued. No defenders fired blazing arrows at the attackers below or poured boiling oil on soldiers swarming up the walls. Nothing ever happened here.

In fact I’d like to be able to say that is why the place feels so restful today. With its trees and newly mown grass pristine in the evening sunshine it seems more like a park of peace than a structure of war. The lower gatehouse was used as a temporary prison in the eighteenth century but that’s about the grimmest it can muster.

And by then the castle had been ruined anyway. Not by gunfire but by builders come to steal stones in the night. Half the village was built of the dressed stone plundered from the castle.

Yet it is would be an ideal place to hold a pageant. Perhaps that of Gilbert’s mother - Joan of Acre - born to King Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, while they were on crusade in Syria. Joan had a turbulent life and was married twice - the first to Gilbert’s father; the second, scandalously to a lowly squire, Ralph de Monthermer, whom she married for love, in secret, and much to the dismay of her regal father, who then had Ralph imprisoned, I suppose for lèse-Majesté. Fortunately, he relented.

She died, supposedly in childbirth, at the age of 35, when young Gilbert was just 16. It is tempting to think he conceived the idea of this castle as a tribute to his mother and that is why it is so peaceful. She is after all supposed to be saintly. Fifty years after being interred the body was still, so the chronicle relates, in a perfect state. Indeed, when pressed with the hands her nipples ‘even rose up again.’

Goodness, whatever could she have been dreaming of? How does one put that in a pageant?



Photos are of the castle and the peaceful bailey

THE IMPORTANCE OF GOING TO SEE 'EARNEST"

Not a real blog this - just a review (wot I wrote) of Rain or Shine's recent production of 'The Importance of Being Earnest' in our neck of the woods. Just in case anyone reading this might be wondering whether to go and see it. The answer is 'yes.'

The Importance of Being Earnest. Rain or Shine Theatre Company - Bryn Garw, Bridgend. 9 June 2010.

If you love theatre then don’t miss Rain or Shine’s latest production of Oscar Wilde’s classic ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.’ They are touring throughout the summer and what better entertainment could there be to accompany your midsummer picnic? Light as a meringue, yet deep as the earth, Wilde’s genius is a vivid today as a century ago. The play ages not at all.

As with all Rain or Shine productions, the pace is fast, the acting bold, the costumes extravagant, the staging witty and the direction deft. You are promised a treat and take away the memory of a treat and a half.

Moreover, as with all their shows, you, the audience, are part of the production. The wind that blows on the actors faces blows on yours as well. The rain....... well, this time we were in a marquee! Five minutes into the performance a storm of tropical proportions broke above our heads. Jack’s exchange with Gwendolen about the weather "Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing......" took on vivid new meaning.

Yet, it is hard to watch a performance of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ - even one as true as this to the buoyant fripperies of the times - without being reminded of the sadness and despair from which Oscar Wilde constructed this lightest and most intelligent of comedies.

He had had a cruel interview with Lady Queensberry, the mother of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas; Lord Queensbury arrived on the first night of the show with the aim of pelting Wilde with vegetables as he took his bow. Fortunately, he was denied entry. As Wilde rapidly descended into social disgrace the show was pulled after only 83 performances. As Lady Queensberry lived in Bracknell, her transmutation into Aunt Augusta (Lady Bracknell) must have been yet another aggravation for the family.

So this is a play of savage contrasts. Wilde takes accepted wisdom and gives us the reverse. For each Victorian value - thrift, hard work, respectability, gravitas, his characters find a reason to do (or be) the opposite. We can laugh now at Wilde’s pricking of Victorian pomposity, but a hundred years ago some of the lines must have been close to the bone.

But ‘Earnest’ is also a play about identity, about trying to escape fate by pretending to be who we aren’t. “All women grow up to be like their mothers,” says Algernon. “That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” Is there a hint in James Reynard’s direction that Pippa Meekings' Gwendolen is fast following in Aunt Augusta’s footsteps? I think so.

She, it has to be said, is not your traditional Aunt Augusta, though she shakes her walking stick in a manner to make the stoutest of hearts quiver. Hilary Derrett plays her as an intelligent matriarch who carries pencil and paper and who uses etiquette simply as it may suit.

The play has many memorable lines - lines that have entered the collective memory as vividly as any Shakespearian quip: ‘the truth is rarely pure and never simple;’ ‘to lose one parent, Mr Worthing, might be described as a misfortune.......’ and, of course, the totemic ‘a handbag!?’ (Edith Evans once said that she started that line by clenching the buttocks!).

Ah - the handbag! The one ‘point faible,’ I’m afraid, unless it was some substitute handbag that had made an accidental appearance at Bryn Garw. It seemed more of a briefcase and certainly not something within which to deposit an infant, even one asleep at the time. Surely, Miss Prism would have been carrying one of Mr Gladstone’s inventions, some voluminous carpet bag, especially to carry the manuscript pages of a three volume novel of ‘revolting sentimentality.’

Mmmm.. sounds rather intriguing - and like all missing manuscripts, I rather wonder what might have become of it, after it was found in that ‘remote corner of Bayswater?’

Still, clearly a five star show. Go see and enjoy!