‘Of course,’ said a candid friend recently, ‘we all know you like to draw attention to yourself.’ The remark offended me for some reason, perhaps that it seemed unarguably true. You would have thought that at my age that particular temptation might have withered on the bough, but how can you account for my willingness—eagerness indeed—to read the lesson or join in play readings and literary hours as anything other than a desire to show off?
Lent is the season when we are supposed to identify and, if possible, eradicate our vices. As the days drag by, with the added discomforts of the weather, we feel under greater and greater pressure to do something about our thoughts and behaviour, and so when Good Friday looms nearer, it is almost unbearable to sit there complacently. Effort is required, and this year for me the Moment of Truth arrived.
Jan Rushton had arranged a really superb anthology about the meaning of Our Lord’s Passion and asked the Vicar and five others, including me, to read it aloud at lunch-time on the Wednesday of Passion Week. For such an old man, my timetable was pretty busy just then, but the attraction was irresistible, and there we all were in the late morning, practising our pieces together.
The extracts Jan had given me were real beauties, so, although my preparations had been rather skimped, there seemed to be nothing to worry about. My cheerful arrogance actually prompted me to suggest to two of my fellow-readers how they might improve their delivery. You may like to imagine one of the angels indulging in a tight little smile about that.
My first contribution was to be a repentant poem by John Donne. The second line gave me a nasty shock: the words came out in the wrong order, so there was nothing else to do but go back and repeat them; otherwise they wouldn’t have made sense. But that was nothing, compared with what was to come. My next piece began, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ which could hardly have been more suitable, because I’d lost my place in the script. Quickly and understandingly, Jan shot out a hand and lent me hers.
The climax came with my third piece, when a lot of loose papers fell out of my script and fluttered all over the floor. There they had to lie, until I crept back to gather them up after the Literary Hour was over. That is the time when the readers usually fraternise with the audience over a cup of coffee, but it was not entirely unwelcome that my own time-table prevented me from staying. The payoff didn’t come till Sunday, when I told my sad story to one of the most gifted members of the Hampstead Players. ‘Oh really?’ he said. ‘I didn’t notice; I was concentrating on the script.’
That should have taught me, shouldn’t it? The sad thing is that apparently it hasn’t. In spite of that cautionary lesson, what is this little anecdote but another way of drawing attention to myself?
Lenten Lesson
Bill Fry