The Complete Works. George Orwell
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anything out of glue and brown paper; she could even make a passably good periwig, with a brown paper skull-cap and dyed tow for the hair. Taking the year through, the amount of time she spent in struggling with glue, brown paper, butter muslin and all the other paraphernalia of amateur theatricals was enormous. So chronic was the need of money for all the Church funds that hardly a month ever passed when there was not a school play or a pageant or an exhibition of tableaux vivants on hand—not to mention the bazaars and jumble sales.
As Percy—Percy Jowett, the blacksmith’s son, a small curly-headed boy—got down from the bench and stood wriggling unhappily before her, Dorothy seized a sheet of brown paper, measured it against him, snipped out the neckhole and armholes, draped it round his middle and rapidly pinned it into the shape of a rough breastplate. There was a confused din of voices.
Victor: “Come on, now, come on! Enter Oliver Cromwell—that’s you! No, not like that! Do you think Oliver Cromwell would come slinking on like a dog that’s just had a hiding? Stand up. Stick your chest out. Scowl. That’s better. Now go on, ‘Cromwell: “Halt! I hold a pistol in my hand!” ’ Go on.”
A girl: “Please, Miss, Mother said as I was to tell you, Miss——”
Dorothy: “Keep still, Percy! For goodness’ sake keep still!”
Cromwell: “ ’Alt! I ’old a pistol in my ’and!”
A small girl on the bench: “Mister! I’ve dropped my sweetie! [Snivelling] I’ve dropped my swee-e-e-etie!”
Victor: “No, no, no, Tommie! No, no, no!”
The girl: “Please, Miss, Mother said as I was to tell you as she couldn’t make my knickers like she promised, Miss, because——”
Dorothy: “You’ll make me swallow a pin if you do that again.”
Cromwell: “Halt! I hold a pistol——”
The small girl (in tears): “My swee-e-e-e-eetie!”
Dorothy seized the glue-brush, and with feverish speed pasted strips of brown paper all over Percy’s thorax, up and down, backwards and forwards, one on top of another, pausing only when the paper stuck to her fingers. In five minutes she had made a cuirass of glue and brown paper stout enough, when it was dry, to have defied a real sword-blade. Percy, “locked up in complete steel” and with the sharp paper edge cutting his chin, looked down at himself with the miserable resigned expression of a dog having its bath. Dorothy took the shears, slit the breastplate up one side, set it on end to dry and started immediately on another child. A fearful clatter broke out as the “noises off” began practising the sound of pistol-shots and horses galloping. Dorothy’s fingers were getting stickier and stickier, but from time to time she washed some of the glue off them in a bucket of hot water that was kept in readiness. In twenty minutes she had partially completed three breast-plates. Later on they would have to be finished off, painted over with aluminium paint and laced up the sides; and after that there was the job of making the thigh-pieces, and, worst of all, the helmets to go with them. Victor, gesticulating with his sword and shouting to overcome the din of galloping horses, was personating in turn Oliver Cromwell, Charles I, Roundheads, Cavaliers, peasants and Court ladies. The children were now growing restive and beginning to yawn, whine and exchange furtive kicks and pinches. The breast-plates finished for the moment, Dorothy swept some of the litter off the table, pulled her sewing-machine into position and set to work on a Cavalier’s green velvet doublet—it was butter muslin Twinked green, but it looked all right at a distance.
There was another ten minutes of feverish work. Dorothy broke her thread, all but said “Damn!” checked herself and hurriedly re-threaded the needle. She was working against time. The play was now a fortnight distant, and there was such a multitude of things yet to be made—helmets, doublets, swords, jackboots (those miserable jackboots had been haunting her like a nightmare for days past), scabbards, ruffles, wigs, spurs, scenery—that her heart sank when she thought of them. The children’s parents never helped with the costumes for the school plays; more exactly, they always promised to help and then backed out afterwards. Dorothy’s head was aching diabolically, partly from the heat of the conservatory, partly from the strain of simultaneously sewing and trying to visualise patterns for brown paper jackboots. For the moment she had even forgotten the bill for twenty-one pounds seven and ninepence at Cargills. She could think of nothing save that fearful mountain of unmade clothes that lay ahead of her. It was so throughout her day. One thing loomed up after another—whether it was the costumes for the school play or the collapsing floor of the belfry, or the shop-debts or the bindweed in the peas—and each in its turn so urgent and so harassing that it blotted all the others out of existence.
Victor threw down his wooden sword, took out his watch and looked at it.
“That’ll do!” he said in the abrupt, ruthless tone from which he never departed when he was dealing with children. “We’ll go on on Friday. Clear out, the lot of you! I’m sick of the sight of you.”
He watched the children out, and then, having forgotten their existence as soon as they were out of his sight, produced a page of music from his pocket and began to fidget up and down, cocking his eye at two forlorn plants in the corner which trailed their dead brown tendrils over the edges of their pots. Dorothy was still bending over her machine, stitching up the seams of the green velvet doublet.
Victor was a restless, intelligent little creature, and only happy when he was quarrelling with somebody or something. His pale, fine-featured face wore an expression that appeared to be discontent and was really boyish eagerness. People meeting him for the first time usually said that he was wasting his talents in his obscure job as a village schoolmaster; but the truth was that Victor had no very marketable talents except a slight gift for music and a much more pronounced gift for dealing with children. Ineffectual in other ways, he was excellent with children; he had the proper, ruthless attitude towards them. But of course, like everyone else, he despised his own especial talent. His interests were almost purely ecclesiastical. He was what people call a churchy young man. It had always been his ambition to enter the Church, and he would actually have done so if he had possessed the kind of brain that is capable of learning Greek and Hebrew. Debarred from the priesthood, he had drifted quite naturally into his position as a Church schoolmaster and organist. It kept him, so to speak, within the Church precincts. Needless to say, he was an Anglo-Catholic of the most truculent Church Times breed—more clerical than the clerics, knowledgeable about Church history, expert on vestments, and ready at any moment with a furious tirade against Modernists, Protestants, scientists, Bolshevists and atheists.
“I was thinking,” said Dorothy as she stopped her machine and snipped off the thread, “we might make those helmets out of old bowler hats, if we can get hold of enough of them. Cut the brims off, put on paper brims of the right shape and silver them over.”
“Oh Lord, why worry your head about such things?” said Victor, who had lost interest in the play the moment the rehearsal was over.
“It’s those wretched jackboots that are worrying me the most,” said Dorothy, taking the doublet on to her knee and looking at it.
“Oh, bother the jackboots! Let’s stop thinking about the play for a moment. Look here,” said Victor, unrolling his page of music, “I want you to speak to your father for me. I wish you’d ask him whether we can’t have a procession some time next month.”
“Another procession? What for?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You can always find an excuse for a procession. There’s the Nativity for the B.V.M. coming off on the eighth—that’s good enough for a procession, I should think. We’ll do it in style. I’ve got hold of a splendid rousing hymn that they can all bellow, and perhaps we could borrow their blue banner with the Virgin Mary on it from St. Wedekind’s in Millborough. If he’ll say the word I’ll start practising the choir at once.”
“You know he’ll only say no,” said Dorothy, threading a needle to sew the buttons on the doublet. “He doesn’t really approve of processions. It’s much better not to ask him and make him angry.”
“Oh,