MORNING SERIAL
‘WHAT is, Willie?’ asked Uncle Edwin, who was exhausted by watching the final rehearsal and talking with Festus Phelps about the crass, anti-cultural attitude of Gough and Coleman. Uncle Edwin had not been listening at all attentively when Gomer had explained the day before about Sewell’s visits to the home of Moira Hallam to give her secret instruction in being a Carmen. So Willie Silcox had Edwin foxed. ‘What is, Willie?’ he asked again, hoping that the blankness on his face would send Willie whispering to someone else.
‘Playing “Abide with Me” on a small harmonium right on top of a mood of intense longing. I’ve known it bring down the whole mental scaffolding of voters before this.’
Uncle Edwin asked Tasso to turn up the steam of the urn to a point where it would blot out Silcox. Then we resumed our study of Sewell.
‘Tasso,’ said Sewell, ‘slip another beef cube in this cup and warm the water up while I tell you about my troubles with those women, the Britannias. I’ve spent weeks trying to find out why they go so out of tune on “Rule, Britannia”. If they were all brazen and defiant like their leader, that heavy, fierce woman, Maudie Gordon, I don’t think they’d have any trouble. But there’s a core of very shy women there, I’m sure, who must have been in a mood of strange brief frenzy when they signed up in the Britannias in the first place, and who still feel horrified when they find themselves out in the street with little more on than a single layer of thin Union Jack. They play out of tune to take the public’s mind off how much they’re showing. I’ve got five members of my madrigal group to march on each side of them, singing the melody loud and plain to keep them on the pitch, but I don’t know how the judges will take to that tactic. I’ve chosen madrigal singers who don’t open their mouths very wide and we’ll have them edging in towards the Britannias from time to time as if they were members of the public, not to make the thing too obvious.’
CONTINUES TOMORROW