By the end of the last full week of term I knew that the play was going to be a complete and utter flop. They just couldn’t seem to feel the awe, the reverence…
‘Fear not,’ Jimmy MacAlpine would yell lustily from his step-ladder at a Maggie Burtt about as fearful as a haggis.
‘‘Ere, ‘ave some gold,’ mumbled the Magi, thumping their offerings like sacks of coal across the baby’s chipped and china feet.
I must say Mr Hunter, whose cool, austere and Christian name was Charles, was marvellous. Never once did he say that he had told me so. Never once did he even hint that ‘Drama Should Come Spontaneously From Within’. And as he picked his way across my classroom that last Friday, dodging collapsible stable doors and avoiding deformed angelic harps, and took with gentle hands the maimed and bleeding thing that was my register, I thought that two hundred rose-pink, low-level toilets with onyx cisterns would not have been too good for him.
By the morning of the performance I had reached that bottomless pit of gloom and apprehension which is reserved for people who get mixed up in producing plays.
And then, just as I was tottering towards the staff-room for morning break, a small boy panted up to me and handed me a note. And when I had read it, hope — no longer a stranger — uncurled inside my sleeping breast. Not only hope, actually, but an idea — rather a good idea — though it involved certain risks. So busy was I working it out that I didn’t even hear the usually deafening sound of Miss Crisp crunching with white and even teeth, her custard cream.
Mr Hunter was letting us use the hall, at the end of which was a raised platform which made (though it was curtainless) a splendid stage.
By two-thirty the mothers were in their place, the other classes with their teachers had filed in behind them. I pinned on Maggie’s mantle for the third time, muttered final instructions to Jimmy MacAlpine and went to the piano out in front. Mr Hunter nodded. I broke into ‘A Virgin Most Pure’.
And the play began…
I shall never forget it, never! I couldn’t see a lot from where I sat at the piano but I could hear and, by heaven, I could feel! And even before Jimmy, pale with excitement, had finished annunciating from his ladder, I knew it was going to be all right. Better than all right. A triumph!
All the awe, the wonder I had tried to get across and failed, were there right now. Joseph leading Mary into the stable with a sudden, startled look — a look of conspiracy — as though this birth was a marvellous secret they both shared. Maggie Burtt herself, crooning over the crib, half-dotty with tenderness. The shepherds pushing, jostling for a view of the manger… Long, long before the Magi rode in and laid their gifts with fearful tenderness beside the crib, there wasn’t a dry-eyed mother in the hall.
As a matter of fact, I was a trifle misted-up myself. Which is why, thumping out, ‘Oh Come Let Us Adore Him’ for the final tableau, I did not at once take in the fact that two enormous blue policemen had entered the hall and were walking, grimly purposeful, to Mr Hunter’s side.
Almost immediately I began to feel sick. So it seems did Jimmy MacAlpine, for he broke from the tableau on the stage and dived for my skirt, wriggling off his wings as he came. His flight was the signal for the other children to jump off the platform too and seek the shelter of their Mums. One didn’t trifle with policemen at Markham Street.
From the empty stage, the forgotten manger, came a single sound: ‘Gaa!’ And then again, imperatively: ‘Gaa!’
I lifted my head. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Mr Hunter leapt on to the platform and the two policemen followed. There was a moment’s frozen silence, then: ‘Will you come here, please, Miss Bennett?’ called Mr Hunter, and there was something in his voice that I had never heard before.
I dislodged Jimmy and climbed up. Then I stood looking down at the manger.
Something was wrong all right…
There he lay on a snow-white lace-edged cushion, his silky, dandelion curls adorably tumbled; his dark, measureless lashes framing the night-blue eyes… Lay there, smiling his celestial gummy smile, flexing his shell-pink toes and crowing in uncontainable ecstasy. No wonder the play had been a triumph!
‘It’s the Butterworth baby all right,’ said one of the policemen.
‘Did you know that this baby was stolen from its pram earlier today, Miss Bennett?’ said Mr Hunter, his voice as grey and relentless as winter rain.
‘Of course she knew it! She stole it herself! She as good as told me she was going to!’ Miss Crisp had broken from the audience and was pointing at me with a shaking finger.
‘I saw her myself,’ she continued to shriek. ‘I saw her at dinner-time sneaking in something wrapped in a shawl.’
The second policeman turned half apologetically to me. ‘Seems as someone did see you, Miss, coming down the hill…’
I looked over to where Jimmy MacAlpine, pale and shaking, was crouching by the piano. I didn’t understand anything, not anything at all.
No, that wasn’t altogether true. One thing I understood all right. The cold, hostile, accusing look on Mr Hunter’s half averted face.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. ‘I did it. I stole the baby from his pram.’
Later they made me go to the police station and asked me a lot of questions. Mr Butterworth was there, blue-jowled and ferocious and though no harm had befallen his baby, there was talk of prosecutions and summonses and a lot of other things I scarcely heard and didn’t try to understand.
I was frantic by the time I got back to school, but it was all right. Though the children had all gone, ‘Our Les’ was exactly where I had left him, tucked into his cardboard box in the corner of the Wendy House.
I pulled it out and looked at him.
All right, so he was no beauty. Was in fact the ugliest baby I had ever seen… He had scurf; he had spots and in the stumpy blob which passed for his nose, the mucus bubbled like soup.
Still, he was a baby, a real baby and when Mrs Burtt’s cousin’s sister-in-law had sent a message that morning to say I could have him for the play I’d been overjoyed. So had Jimmy, when I swore him to secrecy and showed him how to put the baby in the manger just before the play began. Jimmy adored secrets — he’d been enchanted at the idea of surprising the others, and where anything living was concerned I knew him to be one hundred per cent gentle and one hundred per cent safe. In the Children’s Home, it was Jimmy they put in charge of the younger ones.
So why, why? Why had he left ‘Our Les’ to snore in the Wendy House and gone to such crazy and dangerous lengths to secure a substitute?
I fetched the thermos and the bottle ‘Our Les’s‘ mother had given me and gave him a feed. Then I went for his clean nappy.
It wasn’t on the shelf where I had left it. Instead, a crumpled and soiled object lay rolled-up on the floor near by. Jimmy had changed him, then? Better make sure…
I undid the pins. And then, because I knew Jimmy like I knew Mr Hunter (and for the same reason) I understood everything. It was my fault, of course. Everything was my fault. I simply hadn’t checked the facts. I had made an assumption about ‘Our Les’ and the assumption had been crashingly unjustified. And in stressing as I had done throughout the year the strength and vigour, above all the masculinity of Our Lord’s life on earth I had made sure of one thing. Never in a hundred years would Jimmy MacAlpine allow the part to be taken by a girl!
It was almost dark by the time I had taken the baby home and returned to school. Only in Mr Hunter’s office a light still burned.
It didn’t take me long to scribble my resignation and take it across to him.