Therapy

but I backed down and apologized. I didn’t want to be fired from the show. Not only was it rather fun, but it afforded me many extra opportunities to meet Maureen, and see her home, which Mr and Mrs Kavanagh could not possibly veto. And I certainly didn’t want to leave her unprotected in Bede Harrington’s directorial power. I had noticed that, in his role as Joseph, he took every opportunity to put a supporting arm round Mary’s shoulder on the journey to Bethlehem and during the Flight into Egypt. By watching his performance very intently, with a faint, sardonic smile on my face, I was confident that I deprived him of any thrill from these physical contacts; and afterwards, when I walked Maureen home, I enjoyed my own sensual pleasures all the more.
    Then Bede succumbed, rather late in life, to chicken pox, and was off sick for two weeks. He sent a message that we should carry on rehearsing under the direction of a boy called Peter Marello, who was playing the Chief Shepherd. But Peter was also captain of the football team and a good mate of mine. He deferred readily to my judgement in matters theatrical, as did the other members of the cast, and I became in effect the acting director. I thought I improved the show no end, but Bede wasn’t best pleased when he returned, spotted with fading pustules and pockmarks, to see the result.
    I had cut out the tedious recitation of the whole of T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” which Bede had put into the mouth of one of the Three Kings, and written two big new scenes for Herod, based on memories of Sunday-School bible stories and Scripture lessons at school. One had Herod dying horribly, eaten up by worms — this promised to be a wonderful Grand-Guignol spectacle, involving the use of Heinz tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce as a prop. The other was a kind of flash-forward to the beheading of John the Baptist by Herod at the behest of Salomé. I had persuaded a girl called Josie, in principle, to do the dance of the seven veils in a body-stocking; she was a cheerful peroxide-assisted blonde who worked in Woolworths, wore bright red lipstick, and had a reputation for being a good sport, or rather vulgar, according to your point of view. Unfortunately it appeared that I had muddled up three different Herods in the New Testament, so Bede deleted these “excrescences”, as he called them, without my being able to put up much of a fight. Even so, I think it is safe to say that the character of Herod figured more prominently in our nativity play than in any version since the Wakefield cycle.
    We were now well into December, and Father Jerome, who had left us very much to our own devices up till then, requested to see a run-through. It was perhaps just as well that Salomé’s dance of the seven veils had been cut, because even without it our play was insufficiently reverent for Father Jerome’s taste. To do Bede Harrington justice, he had tried to get away from the usual series of pious tableaux, and to write something more modern, or as we would learn to say in another decade, “relevant”. After the Annunciation, for example, Mary suffered from her Nazarene neighbours something of the prejudice experienced by unmarried mothers in modern Britain, and the difficulty of finding room in the inn at Bethlehem was obliquely linked to the contemporary housing shortage. Father Jerome insisted on the removal of all such unscriptural material. But it was the spirit of the whole production which really disturbed him. It was too profane. “It’s more like a pantomime than a Nativity play,” he said, baring his fangs in a mirthless grin. “Herod, for instance, puts the Holy Family in the shade entirely.” Bede looked at me reproachfully, but his long face lengthened even more as Father Jerome went on: “That’s not Laurence’s fault. He’s a fine actor, giving his best. The trouble is with the rest of youse. There’s not half enough spirituality. Just consider what this play is about. The Word made Flesh. God Himself come down from heaven as a helpless babby, to dwell amongst men. Tink of what it meant to Mary to be singled out to be the Mother of God — ” here he looked searchingly at Maureen, who blushed deeply and lowered her eyes. “Tink what it meant to Saint Joseph, responsible for the safety of the Mother of God, and her infant Son. Tink what it meant to the shepherds, poor hopeless fellas whose lives were little better than the beasts they looked