Chapter 4 Pageantry
Pageantry
“I’ve been thinking,” Denholm said, startling Evans, who hadn’t seen him enter the room.
“Again?” Flynn said.
“About the provinces.”
“What about them?”
“We’re receiving a lot of enquiries about pageants,” Denholm said. “The best way to organize them and so on. They are, of course, the perfect vehicle for celebrating the history of this island kingdom, a history writ both large and small.”
Evans was Welsh and Badger, despite Norfolk, was almost entirely metropolitan in outlook, and so in Denholm’s eyes Flynn’s northern status made him an expert on all things in the Ultima Thule beyond Watford.
“I don’t have time for pageants,” Flynn said, his defences already up. “I’ve got the Poems and the Rooms to monitor.”
The “Rooms”—as Flynn thought of them—were in the Homes and Gardens Pavilion and were intended to be fully furnished mock-ups, almost like theatre sets, not to be entered by the public but to be peered into.
The idea was that they would show the contemporary home, from a “Room for an Infant” to a “Room for a Businessman” and everything imaginable in between.
“From the cradle to the grave,” Denholm said when first introducing the office to the concept, although the tomb, disappointingly, was not addressed.
In fact, the Rooms all still remained on their drawing boards and the designers wouldn’t let Flynn anywhere near them. His report to the Rooms Committee was the same every time: “The designers say the Rooms are coming on nicely.” It was a report which seemed to satisfy everyone.
“I hear that they have added more Parlours,” Denholm said.
“They have,” Flynn said. The proliferation of Parlours was a mystery to everyone. “I believe they’re up to five now, with more planned.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Denholm said. “Parlours are deathly places. Or perhaps purgatorial. One remembers seemingly endless Sunday afternoons sitting in the front parlour—”
The Boy yelped with laughter. Apparently this was a euphemism used by his sisters for an unmentionable part of their anatomy.
Evans slapped him on the back of his head.
Denholm, despite his confusion at this interjection, picked up the threads of his rather maudlin reminiscence.
“Sitting in the front parlour”—Evans lifted a warning finger at the Boy—“with one’s parents, being forced to listen to recordings of Mahler when one longed for a little light opera.
And then finally Mother would say, ‘Will you put the kettle on for tea, Jeremy?’ and the suffering would be over for another week. ”
Except for the Boy’s own suffering from suppressed hysteria, none of them responded to this suburban cri de coeur. Denholm smiled wanly. He was accustomed to their neglect.
Flynn tended to agree with Denholm. It seemed to him that a parlour was something that should have gone out with the war. Wasn’t the Festival supposed to be about the future of modern design?
There had been a parlour in the house he grew up in, in Acomb, a suburb of York defined by its semi-detached houses and large gardens.
It was a house with rules, with unheated rooms and inherited old-fashioned furniture.
Their parlour had stiff-backed chairs, a hard sofa and a smoky coal fire that was rarely lit.
“Kept for best,” their mother said, which meant stultifying visits from a dreary contingent of great aunts and uncles twice a year, at Easter and Christmas.
“We come bearing gifts,” one or the other of them would inevitably chortle.
The “gift” usually translated into a half-crown “for a new book.” Flynn would dutifully trot along to Godfrey’s in Stonegate and buy the latest Biggles, while his brother, Charlie, would buy sweets with his bounty and then covertly share them with Flynn.
Flynn could still recall the acidic tingle of lemon drops on his tongue.
Sweets were strictly rationed by their mother, as if they might somehow lead to moral downfall.
Their mother must have enjoyed the frugality of war when it came.
All that denial, and for what? The reward of a grave in the cold, clammy soil of York Cemetery.
“Anyway, no need for agitation, Mr. Flynn,” Denholm said. “I know that you have enough on your plate without pageants. I was thinking of you, Mr. Evans.” He swivelled suddenly towards Evans, who made a small choking noise that might have signalled despair.
“I thought you would be the perfect person to pilot the provinces through the process of pageant production.” With an effort, Denholm pulled himself out of the mire of alliteration and said, “It’s just administration.
Not even that, really—simply keeping an eye on them.
Spurring them on from afar, giving them moral support, which is all we’re able to afford, I’m afraid.
You’ll hardly need to leave your desk.” Evans was the last person to be chosen for this chore.
He didn’t have a pageantry bone in his body.
“Merrie Olde England and all that,” Denholm wheedled encouragingly.
“That’s what pageants tend to be about. Merrie Olde Britain, really,” he amended hastily, as everyone was under strict instruction to keep in mind the other three cardinal points on the Festival compass.
“It doesn’t sound right though, does it?
” he mused. “And it would be even more odd-sounding if we said Merrie Olde Scotland or Merrie Olde Wales. You’re Welsh, Evans. ”
Evans agreed that he was.
“I must say, you’re more subtle with it than some. You’re not all bore das and boyos and yaki dahs.” He over-egged the accent, making Evans wince. “Had a small part in The Corn Is Green at the Duchess before the war. I was a thespian, you know,” Denholm added, preening a little.
“Mr. Denholm means an actor,” Evans translated for the Boy, who was even less impressed by acting as a profession than he was by journalism.
“Oh, yes, an old ham, that was me,” Denholm said, hoping for curiosity, admiration even, but finding neither.
“Old ham?” the Boy sniggered, looking to Evans for elucidation, but Evans just rolled his eyes. “Mr. Evans does say ‘Boyo’ though,” the Boy said to Denholm. He was under the impression that it was a version of his own name.
“And I don’t expect you’d call Wales ‘merrie,’ would you, Mr. Evans?” Denholm said, ignoring the Boy.
“Far from it.”
“What about Merrie Olde Northern Ireland?” Badger offered.
“Nothing ‘merrie’ about Northern Ireland, I can assure you,” Denholm said.
“Trod the boards in Belfast once myself. Pretty grim stuff, I can tell you. Whip up enthusiasm in the shires, that’s the idea, Mr. Evans.
If they ask for help then perhaps, as well as encouragement, you can find these towns and villages a kind of pattern to follow, a blueprint to guide them through the process.
Even the smallest hamlet has something to celebrate—a local worthy. A famous son.”
“Or daughter,” the Boy said. He had five sisters and had been drilled by them.
“Or daughter,” Denholm acknowledged. “And everywhere has some contact, if only tangential, with the big events of history.”
“Like the Black Death?” Evans offered.
“Well, perhaps not that, Mr. Evans. But it’s more or less de rigueur to stick in a Good Queen Bess.
She seems to have progressed through every town and village in Britain.
It makes you wonder how she had time to burn Catholics or fight the Armada.
‘Gloriana’—the very emblem of this scepter’d isle’s greatness. ”
“He thinks he’s still on stage,” Evans murmured to no one in particular.
“Boadicea and Britannia, of course,” Denholm continued, as if he hadn’t heard Evans, although he had. “And let’s not forget St. George.”
“And his Dragon?” the Boy said hopefully.
“Dragons don’t exist. They’re mythic creatures.”
“ ’Course they exist,” the Boy said confidently. “You’re getting them mixed up with dinosaurs. They’re the miffic ones.”
“Mi-thick,” Evans said, refraining from enlightening further. There would be time enough in the Boy’s life for him to be crushed by reality.
—
Flynn skipped lunch and instead sat on a bench in the Embankment Gardens and brooded on the idea of pageantry.
A memory from long ago had been unexpectedly evoked for him.
He must have been nine or ten years old when his school had taken part in some kind of parade depicting the history of York, his hometown.
He had been part of “Roman York,” a soldier dressed in the (painted cardboard) uniform of the famous Ninth Legion.
Tall for his age, he had been the aquilifer, proudly marching along Stonegate as the real aquilifer of the Ninth must have once done, bearing a standard that was topped with a rather wonky papier-maché eagle.
It was unlikely, though, that the Ninth would have been accompanied by an incongruous retinue comprised of Viking raiders, William the Conqueror, Dick Turpin and Guy Fawkes.
“Local worthies” hardly described this parcel of rogues, but there were also the two Saint Josephs of chocolate, Rowntree and Terry—although, sadly, no actual chocolate—as well as a float that carried a miniature train engine, on loan from Scarborough’s North Bay, representing the historic importance of the railways to York.
Although he couldn’t remember from this distance in time, Flynn doubted that the bloodier aspects of local history were included.
It seemed unlikely, for example, that there would have been anything about the merciless Harrying of the North by that same Conqueror.
Nor did he think it had featured the day when the city’s Jewish population had escaped the baying locals by setting themselves on fire in Clifford’s Tower, which was where the latter-day procession had ended in a series of tableaux.