Features and blogging

One of the few things I miss about school (and there’s not much) is the concerts. Full-on choral and orchestral productions took place several times a year, along with the annual Christmas fanfare. How I hated rehearsals, but I loved belting out the harmonies on performance nights, especially at Christmas with tinsel glittering around the main hall. But years before that, in primary school, we had the nativity play to contend with, and that was a very different beast.

We didn’t get a religious upbringing, my sister and I. If pressed on the subject the folks were suitably vague and told us they’d let us decide, but we never did. Added to this, our big local primary school was progressive and very 70s, a typical London mix of allsorts where singing centred around covers of hits by The Beatles and Cat Stevens. So I didn’t get much training in nativity stuff, and therefore wasn’t able to pass much on. But as with my secondary school, music was a very big deal for us infants, each concert a huge performance, including the nativity.

I had a spotlight moment at the age of 5, when I’d been selected to be one of the nativity sheep. We’d spent a long time making beards by gluing cotton wool balls to cardboard. During the play we had to crawl around on our knees and flock to one side of the stage. My badly-glued beard started to fall apart just as I realised I had flocked all alone in the wrong place. A friendly shepherd herded me back to the pen while the choir sang to Mamma Cass on high. I remember the whole sorry episode and feel sure it’s the reason why I have always hated the stage. And that’s funny because 52-year-old Morwenna loves tour-guiding, giving Zoom talks, and guilty pleasure karaoke.

My son is the same, he’d rather paint the set or play the keyboards – and not even that any more. The photo I’ve used here is an accurate portrayal of how he always felt about noisy, never-ending school productions. Bad stage experiences are why so many of us end up writing rather than performing. My late uncle, the playwright Nick Darke loved the stage, wore many hats from a young age (literally) and went into acting as soon as he could, but he did end up writing. On the opening night of a play, you’d find him all alone in the back row, alternately biting his nails and laughing wheezily at his own jokes. I’d choose writing over acting in a heartbeat, and my uncle Nick’s advice was to always be an actor before writing plays. Here I am writing about my own acting debacle so maybe he had a point?

Another reason for my son not enjoying the stage is that although he’s a brilliant comic and tells a cracking joke, he’s not great at pretending to be anyone other than himself. One Christmas Eve when he was four (same age as in this photo), we took him to midnight mass at our local church in Cornwall. This was a some-time tradition of ours that we loved because of the loud singing. At just four years old, though, my small son was never going to last the distance.
Grandma and Grandpa sat on either side of him, and at one point I leaned around my dad to see how he was getting on: Bored with a capital B. Thank goodness for a kind woman in the pew behind us, who leaned towards me and whispered:
’He can play with these,’ before handing over a fully knitted nativity set, crafted entirely from wool. We didn’t hear another peep from small J, and after the last carol I took a look at the arrangement on the wooden pew in front of him.

A wise man was cuddling the donkey. Baby Jesus was being used as a pillow for Joseph, who had been stuffed into the crib under a blanket, in sleeping-off-sherry fashion. You can tell, can’t you, the ones who know the story and the ones who don’t? Now that boy is studying Philosophy A Level and engaging us in lively debates (not arguments, no) about all sorts of things I find it hard to keep up with.

Christmas tradition, values, religious meaning and family stories aside, I often wonder what I’d tell my five-year-old sheep, and it’s something like this: Flock where you want, you’ll find your way eventually.