A School Christmas Nativity by Torchlight!

 

Our local junior school, St Peter’s, here in Ruddington is in the middle of a minor catastrophe. Earlier this week the Headteacher sent out an urgent message to all parents to say that the school was having to close with immediate effect because a building’s inspection had discovered that there were serious structural issues at the school which potentially made the building unsafe. He went on to say that this would mean the school being closed for a significant period until the repairs can be attended to. In the meantime the 350 or so pupils are to be taught in other local schools until Christmas and then after Christmas will be housed in temporary accommodation - I presume Portakabins.

It brought back memories of my own teaching career. About 10 years before I retired my own school suffered a fire which destroyed half of the building. Fortunately, the blaze occurred over a weekend so there was no-one on site but, it meant that within days we were all accommodated in Portakabins on what had once been the playground. We lived in this temporary accommodation for almost two years until the new school was built – so when I read of the problems at St Peter’s it brought back a lot of memories and perhaps a small understanding of what the children and staff at St Peter’s are facing at the moment. I don’t envy them and wish them well.

But there is another reason that this local news chimed. Pat and I both began our teaching careers at St Peter’s in the long gone 1960’s – and a few years later, when we had our own family, our own two children, Kate & John were both pupils at the School. St Peter’s has been very much part of our lives and our family and when I heard of the School’s problems this week, it brought back many memories. The Headteacher’s announcement, of course, had a special resonance given that we are fast approaching Christmas when St Peter’s like just about every school in the country would have been “winding up” for Christmas with thoughts of parties, end of term sing-songs, decorating classrooms and perhaps the school Christmas tree. I don’t know what the School’s plans were this year but perhaps they had a nativity, a concert or a pantomime planned to entertain parents – and it was this thought that leapt to the forefront of my mind when I heard the news.

My mind went back to Christmas 1969 (see the Christmas party pictures of my Year 5 class at the time!). St Peter’s School was in the midst of Christmas preparations, decorating classrooms and rehearsing for the Christmas Nativity, and in the middle of it all the Headteacher, Jack Gregory, announced that we would be receiving a visit from the local School Inspector – Mr Tucker. This was in the days before OFSTED – and to me, a fairly newly qualified teacher, it was a daunting thought; what would he, an HMI (Her Majesty’s Inspector) think of my classroom and my teaching? Should I be doing something very clever and profound with the children to impress him when he came to “inspect” my class and my teaching? In the end I need not have worried – he turned up just as we were busy making Christmas decorations – Christmas mobiles using wire coat-hangers to hang in the classroom. He introduced himself, and warmly asked what we were doing, and then wandered around the room sitting with the children and chatting to them, asking what they were doing and how they were coping with it. I nervously watched, hoping that no disaster or crisis would occur in his time with us. After about twenty minutes he took me to one side and thanked me for my time, generously congratulated me on how busy and engaged the children were and asked if I had thought of making asymmetrical mobiles with the class rather than the simple symmetrical ones that we were making. I had to confess that I hadn’t and he then launched into an explanation of how that might be springboard some interesting maths – and with that he was gone.

My first experience of an HMI – and I never forgot it, but from that point in my classroom career, whenever we made Christmas mobiles I always ensured that asymmetrical mobiles were part of our decorations! Over the years I met Mr Tucker several times until he retired - and he was right; asymmetrical mobiles were indeed a good way of introducing some interesting and testing maths investigations and introducing simple algebra to 10 and 11 year olds. Mr Tucker was from the "old school" of HMI who sought to improve, schools, teaching and teachers by educating, advising, and example. They were the teacher's teachers - a far cry from the modern inspection format created by successive governments and their much criticised and educationally bankrupt offspring, OFSTED - an organisation whose remit is to improve schools by harassment, endless assessment against ill thought criteria and ultimately by naming and shaming schools and teachers who fail meet their often random and subjective but always irrelevant "standards". Where Mr Tucker and the old HMI were concerned with schools as being about people - children and teachers - OFSTED with its often arrogant and always bureaucratic inspectors and reporting system is about tick boxes and the corporate image it has created for itself.

But that 1969 Christmas held another memory. The School were to perform their Nativity play in St Peter’s Church in the village. We had been rehearsing for weeks, visiting the Church often as the day of the performance loomed. The teacher who was producing the performance, Barbara Fisher, was a keen local drama specialist and filled with wonderful ideas, whereas I, as a young teacher, just did as I was told! The evening of the performance approached and the weather in the area deteriorated – bitterly cold and often very foggy – and to make things very much worse the country was increasingly experiencing power cuts as a result of coal miners across the country staging strikes - a precursor to the widespread strikes of the early 1970s. And, with an awful inevitability in the afternoon before the performance we learned on the local news that there might well be power cuts in our south Nottinghamshire area. What to do? Should we call the whole thing off? Barbara Fisher, however, was adamant, in true old trouper, thespian style she announced that the show must and would go on, so all the children and parents were told that when they came to the performance that night they should bring torches and anything that might provide light if we did experience a power cut.

When, at about half past six, we arrived at the Church, a dense fog swirling Ruddington’s streets, the lights had already gone out and we all assembled - parents in the pews, the children gathered with their teachers ready to perform, all of us clutching torches, some having brought oil filled storm lanterns. The Church itself was lit by candles on the window ledges; it took on the aura of a mediaeval nativity scene – magical. I spent the evening standing at the back with all the performers waiting to make their entrances – Mary & Joseph, the Shepherds, the Kings etc. - a script in one hand my torch in the other, giving each group of children the silent signal to make their way down the aisle to perform in front of the parents. Flickering candles and torches lit the vast Church but this didn’t detract – it brought a very special atmosphere and a mysterious wonder to the occasion. And, then, as the Nativity scene reached its climax, Mary & Joseph sitting by the crib, the Shepherds and the Kings kneeling in homage and all the other performers gathered around, Bryan George, the Deputy Head and pianist, struck up the opening bars of “O Come All Ye faithful”……...and then, as if by order from some heavenly presence above and to an intake of breath and exclamation of delight from the audience, the lights suddenly came on, the Nativity scene bathed in light; it was perfect, a never to be forgotten moment. I don’t think I have ever heard “O Come All Ye Faithful” sung so joyfully and lustily – a real celebration; I was not, I believe the only one that night to think that someone somewhere was watching over us!

Little did I know that night that in my future career I would write and produce many Christmas performances in the schools that I worked – every time remembering that first performance and Barbara Fisher’s insistence that the show must go on. And one thing in particular stood out in my memory. Bryan George, the Deputy Head, someone I became good friends with, looked up to and learned from, taught the oldest children in the school and during the performance a group from his class stood and recited Sir John Betjeman’s great poem “Christmas”. I didn’t then know the poem, and as I stood in the dark Church in the flickering candle and torch light, its words carried to me at the back, the performers waiting to make their entrances surrounding me - and Betjeman's words spoke to me. I was carried away with its beauty, its simple truths, its meaning and its exquisite use of language; it seemed to me then, as now, almost sixty years later, to sum up what Christmas is all about. A few years later when our son John was a pupil at St Peter’s he had a verse from the poem to recite in the Christmas performance that year – I sat in the audience both entranced and proud. In the years afterwards, at every Christmas production I wrote or was responsible for in the schools where I worked, Betjeman’s poem was an ever present. All the children knew, that this was Mr Beale’s non-negotiable “special bit” – and the competition in the auditions keen to decide who would be given the opportunity to recite a verse in the final performance?

And today, twenty years after I retired, it is still my “special bit” – something that says it all about Christmas and should be part of everyone’s Christmas season and greetings. It contains the very essence of Christmas as what it is - a Christian festival. It is, on the one hand, a simple acknowledgement of the Christmas story and of our Christmas traditions – the giving of gifts, the decoration of our homes and the like - and yet, as Betjeman tells us it is the most profound insight into the Christian faith and into mankind’s relationship with his God. In an age where in the minds of many the grotesque, sometimes the obscene and, too often, the trivial, the crass and the commercial capture and portray Christmas, Betjeman’s mighty poem is a reminder to all of the true meaning of this greatest of all festivals:

CHRISTMAS

The bells of waiting Advent ring,

The Tortoise stove is lit again

And lamp-oil light across the night

Has caught the streaks of winter rain

In many a stained-glass window sheen

From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.

The holly in the windy hedge

And round the Manor House the yew

Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,

The altar, font and arch and pew,

So that the villagers can say

'The church looks nice' on Christmas Day.

Provincial Public Houses blaze,

Corporation tramcars clang,

On lighted tenements I gaze,

Where paper decorations hang,

And bunting in the red Town Hall

Says 'Merry Christmas to you all'.

And London shops on Christmas Eve

Are strung with silver bells and flowers

As hurrying clerks the City leave

To pigeon-haunted classic towers,

And marbled clouds go scudding by

The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,

And oafish louts remember Mum,

And sleepless children's hearts are glad.

And Christmas-morning bells say 'Come!'

Even to shining ones who dwell

Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true? And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,

A Baby in an ox's stall ?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,

No loving fingers tying strings

Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare -

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

John Betjeman