Open Writing

Not that it is all that interesting, but as I drove out of a side road onto the main road to go and buy some bedroom curtains to surprise Gay on her return home from hospital, I had a sudden flash of remembrance, such as overtake the unmemoried at inopportune moments, such as when driving in traffic and there is no place to pull off the road and jot down the ephemeral remembrance in a notebook to be written up later.

Knowing that my memory was not ‘on the blink’ but that it had actually blinked itself to death and exited the planet, I scrawled ‘NAT’ in my best driving writing on the back of my hand, knowing that it would instantly remind me of the event and then I could compose a masterpiece of English literature around it and get it out in time for Christmas. It was a plan worthy of Shakespeare, Noel Coward, or even John Steinbeck. All one has to do to overcome the misfortune of a bad memory is to have a master plan that will defeat it.

I got the curtains, sheers, rods and poles, sans perches, and found enough enthusiasm to get them fixed on to the wall above the windows, which I thought was cunning. They would have looked silly anywhere else. Then, before retiring, I sat down to mull over the day’s events and contemplate Gay’s homecoming the morrow morn. And that is when my eyes lit on the uncial scrawl on the back of my hand. "NAT." My mind lit up!

NAT what? I wondered, half remembering that it was something I was supposed to remember and then write about. Nothing came. A good half-hour of brainstorming - an unfortunate term in my case - and still nothing had suggested itself. I pondered on like the last bus to Kirkheaton on a winter night through snow and ice when the sole passenger is asleep and the driver almost, but couldn’t even come close to recalling the vivid memory that caused me to want to chronicle it.

I decided to ask my friend. His name is Google, and I get frequent flyer miles from him. Google had some suggestions about NAT but none of them except Mr Cole had ever crossed my radar.

My next port of call was a crossword puzzle site where you enter the letters you do have and put interrogation marks for the missing letters. I tried it with few ?s and rose numerically upwards to many ??????s, but nothing sprang from the brainiac site. My next order of business was a tryst with our Chinese memory foam mattress – a meeting that led to profound sleep and peaceful dreams.

No! But thanks for asking. The solution didn’t come to me in visions of the night, nor was it rolling around in my head when I awoke. I rose up as ignorant as when I had laid me down. NAT still stared at me. It was good ink that would take several washings to fade.

Yet, conscious that it might fade eftsoons and unwilling to lose the benison of a motleyed and peremptory genius that feeds me morsels from time to time, often when I can’t get them down in time to act on them, I wrote NAT on several scraps of paper and placed them at various stations of my home where I would be sure and see them – and, possibly, even remember what it meant!

I then spread the problem before the Brains trust in the Dog Park. The team had a variety of responses including an offer of an eight month-old Border Collie pup, and tales of their own feats of non-remembering. It was all very entertaining, except the puppy, which was more than a little enticing, and more than a little impractical, but no one came up with the solution to what NAT meant.

Back at home the telephone chirped. It was Gay saying she had the ‘all clear’; from the hospitalist – a doctor that takes care of medical matters other than those for which patients are admitted – and she could come home. I loaded the dogs in the rig and set off to the Southland of Gilbert where she had been held hostage for two weeks following a fall that tore off a ligament from her titanium knee replacement.

As we sat on her bed, side by side, waiting for transport to the exit, she noticed the inscription on my hand and asked me what it meant. I told her what I knew. It didn’t take long. I began to ruminate and remember all the things it wasn’t and then started to run through all the words in the English language that started with n-a-t. Guess what? I had it at the second word!

I then told Gay the story and added the rest of the word to the back of my hand so that I could write it up at the first opportunity. Recollecting it for the second also reminded me of another story related to young Thespians and unscripted deliveries and when I told them to Gay she introduced me to another one that is much too precious to non-include.

Telling these stories takes us into the actor’s world of "Never work with children and animals," because Gay’s story is about animals as upstaging and down-staging extras, and my stories are about children on stage and are, in each instance, definitely upstaging.

Gay taught grade school for many years. It’s called grade school because if you don’t get good grades you have to stay there until you do. During the period I now address, she was the Resource Centre manager, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a role in the school nativity play.

This was the year when an arty-crafty teacher sought to inject some realism into the Christmas play and had arranged for a small selection of farm animals to attend and play walk-on parts. Gay’s role was that of animal tender. It must be understood that this role was, as Shakespeare said, thrust on her, for she had chosen to be a child marshaller, not a cowherd, not a lambherd, and definitely not a goatherd.

In the educational system, there are those in charge and those whom those that are in charge are in charge of. Gay was not in charge, but was assigned to receive the little collection of barnyard animals and stop them straying until it was time for them to be steered onstage in the manger scene where they would look like what they were – three lambs, two goats, and a calf – and then they would be steered off the other side and Gay would tend them again until their respective owners came to collect them. What could go wrong?

Gay upset the boss woman by asking where the feed for the little creatures was. Although she is not a farmer, she knows that vertebrate mammals get hungry and that their young get hungrier oftener. For asking a question that the Oberführer had not anticipated, herself not being a farm girl, Gay was consigned to a place called Low Dudgeon, where she remained until the whole thing fell apart.

The notion of introducing the animals into the manger scenes as added drama is contradictory to the standard plot where the manger scene is acted out in the place where the animals actually live. The human players are introduced to the animal's province, but only if the director is familiar with the original plot. However, it is easy to overlook basic facts if you are focusing on something extraneous when it is actually endotraneous.

The first part of the play was done and the manger scene was on. What was not on was the animal group. The person charged with the responsibility of shooing them onstage got the cue right, but the animals, not being trained in stagecraft, didn’t get the message. A bit of shoving and pushing and most of them stumbled bewilderedly onstage where the bright lights and the noisy but warm reaction from the audience surprised them and they panicked.

Panic in animals is usually accompanied by discharging the contents of their bowels and running in all direction at once. These animals did just that, and for an encore whilst ‘on their way to where?’ a couple of them actually broke through the makeshift floor of the staging and were temporarily lost to view.

Of course the smell began to drift through the auditorium, the audience went into fits of laughter, the children onstage alternated between cold fear, hot flushes, and irreverent laughter such as only children can demonstrate, and the animals were gone in a few destructive, chaotic, splintering, side-splitting seconds.

Reading the future with the precision that is typical of those blessed with her degree of intelligence, Gay decided that since she had no charges to tend that she should absent herself with as much dispatch as the goats had shown before the Wicked Witch of the School came and pulled her ears off.

That’s the animals, and it is easy to see that unless one is an animal trainer and knows what one is doing one ought to leave live animals out of entertainment.

The next story deals with Shakespeare’s play, Julius Cæsar, and the scene of the immediate aftermath of the stabbings that cut down Cæsar in his prime and gave Marc Antony occasion to say what a nice man he had killed. A Roman Centurion was to come across the gory scene and declaim, "O, who has done this bloody thing?’

I must explain again, lest the nub of the Noah’s Ark Nativity didn’t reach home, that casting for school plays is never in the hands of experts. Thus, the centurion was chosen because he had an aquiline nose and could pass for Patrician in a push.

The biggest headache of any school drama teacher is finding people that will look the part, remember the part, and turn up on the night to act the part. All other considerations, such as oratory prowess, ability to characterise, and stage presence, are ignored as long as the basics are met.

It matters little that most school plays turn into a sort of choreographed shambles as cues are missed or anticipated, lines are forgotten, and the wrong lines uttered, added to which there are the ever present hovering spectres of wardrobe malfunctions, falling scenery, and stage collapses. No one can say drama is not exciting!

The patrician nose came upon the fatalised Cæsar, and fell into one of the traps into which those whose first Language is not Jacobean English are wont to tumble. His misspeak could not be because dead and soon to be mourned Cæsar was seen to yawn and then quiver and shake as he attempted to suppressed his chortling at his faux pas.

His errant delivery was of the order of something deep inside the lad due to his Yorkshire upbringing. Therefore, forsooth, instead of Willum’s deathless prose, he let out something he had heard his mother shout at him almost every day of his life. In Stentorian tones he expostulated, "Who the bloody hell’s done this?"

The audience went into uproar, the rest of the cast fell about, the drama teacher had an apoplectic fit, and the show was over for the night.

No one knows for sure that the lad had not divined Shakespeare’s real intention with his line. It was a fair question and one that soldiers might well be pressed to ask in such circumstances.

The story I had recalled on my way to a different kind of curtain call has to do with the Innkeeper in the NAT-ivity! That was the mysterious message I wrote to myself and promptly forgot. In this school drama, the same rules of casting applied as in the case of Julius Cæsar.

The lad chosen to be the innkeeper had the personality of a publican and the cheerful and ruddy aspect of a butcher. That was how he got the role.

The role of Innkeeper is not a starring part. It is merely a place in the narrative where the plot gets a little darker and anxiety levels rise even for those that have seen the presentation a dozen or more times, but it is an important juncture as it emphasises the humble circumstances in which the Christ Child came into the world.

The action is simple. Joseph knocks on the door with Mary by his side and asks for a night’s lodgings so that his wife, who is on the verge of being delivered, can rest and have her baby in comfort.

The landlord has to say something on the order of, "Ee! I’m sorry lad, but we’re full up." This is followed by Joseph pleading more earnestly in his wife’s behalf, and the Innkeeper rubbing his chin and saying, "We’ve got some fresh hay in the bier and there’s a nice manger you can use as a baby bed, if you like."

The scene ends there and the next one is the manger tableaux that is a mixture of teatowelled heads, wooden animals, a trio of magi, an indeterminate number of shepherds and a chorus of angles that apparently hate each other.

Everyone is relieved that poor Mary who is but a girl and has travelled far and is weary and about to give birth gets to lay down her head and have her baby. That’s how it is supposed to happen. However, putting a bit of Irish linen on a lad’s head and calling him an Innkeeper does not alter his character to any remarkable degree.

Young Hardcastle was a nice lad, the kind that went to Sunday School, smiled as he broke lumps of coal in the dark with a lump hammer almost as big as himself in his Granny’s dank coal cellar, and helped Boy Scouts across busy roads, whether they wanted to go or not.

It could be that he was not familiar with the Christmas story, but his Sunday School ways seemed to give the lie to that possibility. We might never know, and while the drama teacher didn’t feel that the show was under-rehearsed, that could be an explanation. Drama teachers dealing with a playlet as well known as the NAT-ivity have been known to let their guards down and not pay too much attention to his actors and actresses. Why should they? What could go wrong?

What went wrong was that Hardcastle’s good nature got in the way of history and he re-wrote a good part of basic Christian foundations. He answered the door promptly when Joseph knocked, listened attentively, and with obvious concern, as Joseph detailed the plight of the Holy Couple.

When asked if they could obtain lodging, the Innkeeper threw the door wide open and stretching out his arms said, "Of course we have, old lad, bring her in!"

At Christmastime, it is commonplace to listen to sermons about making room in our hearts for Jesus. It is a good and timely message whenever it is preached, and I never tire of hearing it.

But I can not hear the preaching without thinking of the Innkeeper in the school NAT-ivity, and feeling even more warmed by the enthusiastic landlord and his cheery invitation to enter, and I wish his reply could become part of the Christmas story to serve as an example to those of us whose hearts are not as open as his, nor as willing to receive the Christmas Blessing, even if I can’t always remember what it is called.

Copyright © 2010 – Ronnie Bray

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