(7/20) Fairacre Festival (5 page)

'Jean Cole!' echoed Basil Bradley, turning pink with excitement. 'I'd no idea she was related to you. The most beautiful contralto voice in existence today! She was superb in
Aida
at Covent Garden last year.'

'I have all her records,' said the vicar. 'The Bach arias are my particular favourites.'

Major Gunning bowed his head politely in acknowledgement of the adulation, but his tobacco-stained fingers, drumming on the edge of the table, showed his impatience.

'Yes, well ... top and bottom of it is that she would be willing to give us a tune...'

Basil Bradley winced.

'To come here? To Fairacre?' breathed Mrs Mawne incredulously.

'As I was saying,' continued Major Gunning with a touch of asperity, 'Jean said that she could come and sing in the church during, or after, the
Son et Lumière
performance, if it would help. Not the Monday, though. She's flying back from Berlin that day, after a tour.'

There were delighted cries from the company. The vicar broached the delicate subject which was in all our minds.

'It is indeed the most generous offer. It would mean a great deal to our efforts. But your cousin is—er—much in demand. We must offer her some—er—recompense for the honour she is doing us. Can we...?,

'She'll come,' said the major briefly, 'for nothing. I'll see to that.'

If this sounded a trifle ominous, it was soon forgotten in the general delight.

'It's too good to be true,' cried Mrs Mawne. 'The most encouraging news of the evening!'

And with that we all agreed.

The rest of the programme was settled provisionally. The
Son et Lumière
would take place after dark each evening, beginning about nine. The Festival would begin with a splendid service in the church on the Sunday, at which the Bishop had promised to come and bless our endeavours.

'And all denominations in the area will be invited,' said the vicar.

'Bet they don't all come!' whispered Mr Roberts to me in a horribly penetrating whisper.

'They will be invited,' repeated the vicar reprovingly.

Various functions would take place during the week, a mammoth jumble sale, a gargantuan whist drive and so on, organised by various bodies in the village, and the week would culminate with a magnificent fête in the vicarage garden on Saturday afternoon, to be opened by someone who would be 'a real draw', as Mr Willet said, followed by a dance in the evening.

'Shall we have enough going on to warrant a
whole week?'
asked Mr Willet doubtfully.

'The
Son et Lumière
will be the main thread,' explained the vicar, 'and our other festivities will be hung like jewels, as it were, upon this chain.'

'Very nicely put,' commented Mr Mawne, a trifle drily.

'Yes, it turned out rather more poetically than I intended,' replied the vicar, rather surprised and pleased with his flight of fancy. 'I really should make a note of it for a future sermon.'

By this time the hands of the clock stood at ten o'clock. I went into the kitchen to prepare coffee, and the meeting ended with much animation and hope, on the part of the Fairacre Festival Committee, before they set off to face the wintry night.

Chapter 4

'N
O
, I never!'

'Yes, you did then!'

'I never, I tell you! I never done it!'

'We knows you done it all right, don't us?'

A chorus of self-righteous voices greeted this ungrammatical exchange which floated through the schoolroom window one bright morning. Sometimes I wonder why I trouble to correct the children in the classroom, knowing full well that they will relapse into their mother tongue as soon as they escape from my clutches.

The accused appeared to be Joseph Coggs. I could recognise his hoarse, husky croak easily above the manifold sounds from the playground. He is fairly popular with the other children who do not seem to be bothered by his poor clothes and his gipsy background. What he had done to deserve their united attack I was soon to know.

"Twas there all right yesterday,' said one, belligerently.

'Funny thing you havin' a wooden dagger the same evenin',' shouted another mockingly.

'My cousin from Caxley give it to me,' growled Joseph. 'He got it off of some kid up the street.'

'Likely, ennit?'

'What, same colour an' all?'

The voices grew shriller, and I was half a mind to leave my marking to investigate when I heard Mr Willet's hearty voice.

'What's going on then?'

A dozen voices clamoured together, and the gist of the story was that the hand of the clock had vanished from the Appeal Fund and Joseph Coggs 'had bin and pinched it'.

'You want to watch your tongues,' announced Mr Willet sternly. 'And stop picking on Joe. I took the hand away, if you must know, to put another coat o' paint on it. Put that in your pipes and smoke it, you young know-alls.'

His heavy footsteps passed on, leaving an uneasy silence.

'See?' cried Joseph triumphantly.

'Well, how was we to know?' muttered one of the crowd. 'Your dagger was the spittin' image of that hand.'

'Always on at us to look out for folks breakin' the law,' grumbled another, 'and what thanks do us get for trying?'

'Come on up the coke-heap,' shouted someone cheerfully. 'The bell'll be going before we've had a game.'

And the drama ended in a wild confusion of yells and scrunching coke, enjoyed by accusers and accused alike.

The hand of the clock which had been the cause of this fracas was moving far too slowly towards the target for Fairacre's peace of mind.

The most dramatic leap forward, in these last months, had been caused by an anonymous gift of one hundred pounds. Naturally, rumours as to the identity of this generous benefactor were legion.

'I wouldn't put it past the vicar himself,' said one.

'Or Mr Mawne?' queried another.

'That'll be the day,' said Mrs Pringle sourly, when she neard this suggestion. 'Them Mawnes don't part with money that easy. Best end of neck served up as chops in their house, so my niece Minnie tells me.'

One of the infants thought it might be 'a fairy'. This pretty fancy was soon dispelled by the realists who were slightly older.

'Don't talk soft!' implored her brother Ernest, shamed before his fellows in the playground.

'No such thing as fairies,' added Patrick scornfully. 'And if there was, how d'you think they'd lug a hundred pounds up to the vicar's? They ain't no bigger'n my thumb.'

This irrefutable argument settled the matter, in this instance, but the anonymous donor still remained a fascinating mystery. It was one which was never solved.

Even more exciting than the anonymous gift was that Peter Martin, the pop star and idol of the young, had agreed to open the fête on the Saturday and to sing at the dance in the evening, accompanying himself on the famous guitar. He was going to prove a tremendous draw.

'The weather really won't matter,' said the vicar, beaming. 'People will come from miles around just to see him. A very
personable
young fellow, I believe.'

Mrs Pringle's niece Minnie expressed the general reaction to the news.

'Ain't it just wonderful? We'll be breathing
the very same air
! To think of him coming to this place! All Caxley'll be there. You ever seen him, miss?'

I said that I had not had that pleasure yet.

'Beautiful hair he's got. Long and that, all thick down to his shoulders. And his clothes costs a fortune, and he don't drink nothin' but champagne!'

She sighed ecstatically. A visitation from the entire heavenly host, I thought somewhat tartly to myself, could not occasion more reverent adoration than this one glamorous star. Nevertheless, I too rejoiced. Think how it would swell the funds!

Work on the roof progressed steadily, and the sound of hammers and saws formed the background to our own school activities. These included now, in the last weeks of the spring term, preparations for the entertainment which was to be our contribution to the Fairacre Festival.

Only teachers, who have dealt with these affairs, can truly assess the heart-burnings and headaches which accompany something which the outsider considers a simple, and even a pleasurable, undertaking.

The only other member of the staff is the infants' teacher. For years Miss Clare, now retired and living at Beech Green, ruled the infants, and most of the adults in the village learned to read, write and calculate under her benevolent eye. Miss Gray followed Miss Clare, but left to marry our neighbouring schoolmaster, Mr Annett, who also acts as choirmaster and organist at Fairacre. Then came Miss Jackson, a stormy young woman straight from college whose departure I viewed with relief.

Since then we have had a succession of 'supply' teachers, some good, some ghastly; but for the last year the infants have been in charge of Mrs Bonny, a buxom widow, who manages them very well. All goes swimmingly if she is able to work in her own way, and I interfere as little as possible. Unfortunately, any sort of mild suggestion throws the lady into a defensive and resentful mood, as if one were casting a slur on her abilities. Coming to an amicable arrangement about the concert was an operation fraught with hazards, I found.

My first idea of a play in which the whole school could take part fell upon stony ground.

'Why can't the babies sing their nursery rhymes?' demanded Mrs Bonny plaintively. 'I've spent hours teaching them, and their mothers would love to hear them.'

Both facts were true. The daily chorus—one might be forgiven for saying 'caterwauling'—had penetrated the partition between our classrooms with painful clarity. And the mothers of these young choristers would dote on Mrs Bonny's efforts with them. I agreed resignedly.

'But nursery rhymes won't take very long,' I said, trying not to sound too relieved. 'We'd better have some other items '

Mrs Bonny promised to consider the matter, and within two days the floorboards of the infants' room were reverberating with one of those galumphing folk dances from mid-Europe which involve much clapping and stamping. The clapping and stamping are no doubt performed in unison in the country of the dance's origin, but it certainly was not in Fairacre's infant room. Next door we were sorely tried. It was almost a relief to return to the nursery rhymes, and to listen, wincing, to:

"Ickory, dickory dock
The mou-house run up the clock The clock
struck
ONE
The mouse run down—'

Here there followed a succession of claps as each child took its time to register the need for action, and then, triumphantly they would bellow:

"lckory, dickory, dock.'

Mrs Bonny would then praise them loudly, point out the aspirate at the beginning of 'Hickory' and the necessity of singing 'ran' instead of 'run', and the same thing would be repeated
ad nauseam.

Our own efforts were little better. I had dramatised
The Princess and the Swineherd
which gave everyone a chance of appearing on the stage, and doubted if the words would ever be learnt. Ernest, the only possible swineherd-cum-prince, became so sheepish about performing a courtly bow that I threatened to demote him to a courtier, although we both knew that there was no one else really capable of taking the part. Sometimes I despaired of ever getting Fairacre School to take part in the Festival, and wondered gloomily if the sale of Queen Anne's chalice might not, after all, be a better way of raising the money.

I did not, of course, voice these treacherous sentiments, but Mr Lamb, our village postmaster, spoke about it when I went to buy the school's savings' stamps one afternoon, some weeks later.

'Of course, it's not plain sailing, this selling the church silver. Has to be a Faculty or something the vicar tells me. A lot of chit-chat goes on evidently before permission's given. I can't see us being allowed to part with it. And.
to
tell the truth, I don't think anyone in Fairacre wants to see it go.'

He handed me the stamps and with them three or four photographs in colour.

'Your brother's family?' I asked, looking at them. Mr Lamb's brother George left Fairacre for New York after the war and runs a catering business there. He left before I took over the school but regularly corresponds with our Mr Lamb who shows us the photographs, and tells us all about his brother's successes, when we visit the Post Office. He is very proud indeed of this younger brother, now the father of the three husky boys who beamed from the photographs.

'Just a chance he may be over,' said Mr Lamb, taking back the photographs and inserting them carefully into his wallet. 'Some business trip, he says. They're chartering a plane, it seems, and if he can manage it, he'll be over here for a fortnight.'

This was good news. As I sauntered down the village street, enjoying the sunshine, I hoped, for Mr Lamb's sake, that his brother would be able to return to Fairacre. It was my guess that he would not find it much changed even though he had been absent now for over twenty years.

The question of the sale of the chalice was in everyone's mind. None worried quite as deeply as the vicar. He woke, on these bright summer mornings to the chorus of the birds in his garden and then, after the first few moments of pleasure, the familiar little cloud cooled the sunshine of his waking moments and was with him for the rest of the day. He refused to do anything about negotiations for the sale of the precious chalice. He steadfastly hoped and prayed that enough would be raised by the Festival, and that this step, so repugnant to him, might never be necessary.