Lizzie Dripping

Part of the wonder of the internet is that it allows you to prove that random bits of memory from your childhood did actually have some relationship to reality. It has been like that recently with me and Lizzie Dripping. This TV series, made by the BBC in 1973 and 1974, starred Tina Heath as the eponymous Lizzie who meets a witch in the graveyard of her village church and spends the nine episodes of the series trying to work out whether she is real and what her relationship to her really is: can anyone else see her, is Lizzie herself a sort of witch, and is the witch tied to the village or can she go elsewhere? Of course we viewers can see instantly that the witch is a projection of something inside Lizzie, an outlet for dreams and desires that don’t fit the life of a 12-year-old working-class girl living in a small village in 1970s Nottinghamshire. In fact, I didn’t really remember any of this, not surprisingly as I would have been no older than 5 when the series was broadcast: I did recall the title sequence of Lizzie running down the village street and turning a corner, and her encounters with the witch including the one where she pops up to interrupt a family trip to the seaside, but that was all.

Looking at Lizzie Dripping now (and I’ve just watched all of it) you can see an intriguing mixture of 1970s verisimilitude and unreality. The location, Eakring near Mansfield, feels very real as does the life of Lizzie’s family the Arbuckles, laid-back plumber dad Albert, often quite stressed mum Patty, flowerpot-hatted Gramma who is always on hand with strongly-worded advice which (even Lizzie notices) she does not consistently follow herself, and baby Toby. When Albert wins the village leek-growing competition in ‘Lizzie Dripping and the Leek Nobblers’ the prize is nothing other than a spanking, shiny front-loading washing machine! – we must have acquired ours at roughly the same time – and although Albert drives a truck for work purposes that’s no good for taking the family to the seaside so he borrows a car from a customer as payment for a job. It’s all quite period, and even daring in a way nobody would now even think of being daring: showing ordinary, mostly nice people living very ordinary lives and speaking in extremely strong accents full of beautifully incorrect grammar. Good.

And the grammar, or dialect, leads us to the unreal side of the series. For a start, ‘Lizzie Dripping’ isn’t the character’s name (which is Penelope), but supposedly a Nottinghamshire phrase for a girl who can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. The fact that everyone in the village calls her this, including her sympathetic teacher, and parents, is odd and unexplained. I use the word ‘supposedly’, because I rather suspect author Helen Cresswell made it up. She claimed she heard a neighbour in Eakring using the term for their daughter, but I can’t easily find any indication that it existed before the TV series; we need a dictionary of northern slang but I have none to hand! The 19-year-old Tina Heath has a good stab at being a pre-teen but when placed alongside actual children looks a bit awkward, most acutely when she’s surrounded by a class of singing kids in what is nearly the final scene.

You never see any scenes specifically relating to religious life but in the first episode everyone assumes Lizzie should be at Sunday School (the teacher is away) which I would have thought unusual even for 1970s rural Nottinghamshire. Lizzie teases her very unhumorous Aunt Blodwen that she could help with Sunday School - 'I know it's Church and not Chapel', when it's clear Blodwen would never countenance any such thing. How many children even then would know what that was about? And in the last episode Lizzie refers to the unseen vicar as 'parson'. This all has a slight air of anachronism and I wonder whether Helen Cresswell was remembering her own childhood rather than what she could see around her in 1973.

There are lots of lovely moments: ‘leek nobbling’ prime-suspect Jack Jackson’s face as he only gets third prize in the competition; Gramma following up scolding Lizzie by giving her a mint imperial; snobby Aunt Blodwen’s appalled discomfort on the journey to the seaside when, just after her tirade against ‘day-trippers’ (which of course the family are), Albert strikes up ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’ and everyone except Blodwen lustily joins in; the school children singing a deliciously eerie song about the Pendle Witches which just happens to have been written for the BBC’s schools Music Workshop series in 1971 by Yorkshire poet Harold Massingham and Irish composer Gerard Victory; and just the sights and sounds of Eakring, rechristened Little Hemlock for the series, the flower meadows, the streams, the sunny or rainy churchyard.

It’s the final episode which is something of a masterpiece.  The title ‘Lizzie Dripping Says Goodbye’ flags up the theme but what we get is much more than we might expect. The summer holidays are nearly here and the village school is assembling a time capsule to be opened in 2074; right at the start, Lizzie’s mum tells her she is growing up and the valedictory atmosphere is maintained when Lizzie and irritating southern cousin Jonathan go out to take photos of wild flowers for the archive, prompting Lizzie to meditate on memory and impermanence. She wishes she could put the whole day in the archive. ‘They’ll have days like this, even in 2074’, counters Jonathan. ‘Nor’ exactly’, insists Lizzie, ‘Never have a day again exactly like today. Even we’ll never have one exactly the same. Coz we’ll be different, see.’ She inspects the photo she’s just taken of the meadow. ‘No. That ain’t it. That ain’t it at all. Nowt like, really.’ Show me a contemporary children’s show that philosophical. In the end a bitterly regretful Lizzie has to cope with the departure of the witch, and, as she leaves the graveyard having committed the story to tape, her life is ahead of her. Though her mum’s already accused her of being so morbid that ‘I sometimes think you won’t be happy till you’re buried’, it won’t all be like that. The last sound we hear is the churchyard crows. They really don't make them like that anymore.

The Smoking Ruins

Last week Church Club was a surprise; this week, it was a disaster. I offer you an account only because it shows that I can be doing something for twelve years, and the church for about sixteen, and it can all still go haywire out of the blue. 

We arrived at school to be told that all the Year 1s were out at Sports Day at the local secondary school. We looked at the rain, the first significant precipitation hereabouts for weeks, and thought of the bedraggled six-year-olds making their way back like half-drowned rats. The school has only just re-started mixing year groups in its activities after the pandemic, so this term we only have two Year 2s in Church Club, meaning we started very quietly indeed with two unprecedentedly sensible little girls. 

Sure enough, about twenty minutes into the session the Year 1s began to return, damp and tired - but small children don't express their tiredness as you or I might, by having a nice lie-down for ten minutes, but in activity which is even more frantic and less focused than usual. Despite Sandra's scepticism I thought we would still be able to get through a truncated version of the story (the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders) and the craft (making a little card house), because we always have in the past. The children's inability to listen to anything was marked, as was, once we began the craft, their tendency to do anything but apply themselves to the task in hand. The limited time seemed magically to melt away and we were nearly at home time with me, Sandra and Jill desperately trying to help the children complete something to take home, while a couple of the girls made unfeasibly-elaborately decorated houses and the less-careful Year 1s, more satisfied with their efforts, wrested toys from the trays on the far side of the hall and tore around with them. It was bedlam. I rounded up such children as I could for a final prayer, not without, I fear, some ill-temper on my part as Aaron responded to my demand that the toys be replaced in their trays by getting more out. 

We returned the children to their parents, a few minutes late, and not without trauma. Bobby was in tears as it became horribly clear that he wouldn't complete his house to his satisfaction; Evie was inconsolable as her roof kept coming off. I was mentally composing an email of apology and not far off weeping myself. We looked at the wreckage, and got a broom to sweep up the bits.

Fair Enough

The infants school have removed the last of their pandemic measures and that means they’ve returned to activities that mix year groups. Yesterday I did my first whole-school assembly since March 2020, though the school have been having them for a while. The new time, ten past nine, is a bit of a challenge as for me it means either saying Morning Prayer earlier than its customary start time of 9am or later (earlier makes more sense). Was that set in stone? I asked the head teacher. ‘Not in granite, but I’d say in sandstone’, she replied.

Neither the Church calendar nor school life lent me a clear topic to talk about. Some of the children were at the Spring Fair on Saturday to do country dancing, but, as I told them, there are no stories about fairs in the Bible, and while some people do dance you can’t describe those incidents as stories (actually you could make a story out of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant and being despised by Michal his wife, or indeed of Salome doing her turn, but neither would make for a very edifying narrative). Instead I thought of Woodbury Hill in Dorset where the great Fair – one of the biggest in southern England, in its day – probably began after a hermit came to live in the old hillfort in the 12th century, and an annual gathering was set up by the landowner, Tarrant Abbey, to support them, whoever they were. There was even a holy well there whose waters were drunk by visitors to the Fair. So I made up a bit of a story about a holy man (‘We don’t know his name, let’s call him John’) and how the Fair might have started. I even had a couple of photos to show, one of the Fair in full swing in about 1910, and one I took of the hilltop in 2017, now bare apart from a farmhouse and cows, as you can see here.

It struck me that this is a bit like the stories in saints’ lives, woven out of a few things people did know and a lot of supposition about what must have happened. Possibly some of what is in the Bible isn’t too far from that either. Talking of things half-remembered and half made-up, I’d thought my grandparents had met at Woodbury Hill Fair, but checking back I discovered it was the Ilchester Flower Fair at the Lamb & Lark in Limington, which must have been a much humbler occasion. Nan remembered that Grandad and his brother Alec were there, Alec with his arm in plaster having broken it in the gate-jumping contest. Grandad asked Nan to stay to the dance and so she did. I don’t think we’ll have a gate-jumping contest at the Spring Fair next year.

An Old Venture Made New

It was a huge gamble. For forty years the Swanvale Halt Church Spring Fair has occupied a field outside Hornington town, an increasing effort over the decades and one which, during the re-assessment of everything that took place during the pandemic restrictions, the planning group decided was beyond them to repeat. The suggestion was made to relocate the whole event to the church and churchyard, and scale it down while keeping most of its elements. Would this work? Would we recoup anything worthwhile without the footfall from Hornington High Street just a few yards away, the draw of the bouncy castle and the great ring of tents and stalls? Would it even be possible to do it cramming everything into the immediate curtilage of the church, including finding enough space for the children of the infants school to dance? It did, and it was.

Stalls, children’s activities, visiting choirs and bands, and the aforementioned dancing children, all duly appeared and did their stuff. The rain threatened, and occasionally splashed down the upturned instruments of the Hornington Brass Band, but generally stayed away. And we made a kind of profit on the event that we would have been pleased to make in its old format. ‘Great to have something right here in the centre of the community’, was the consensus. What a relief!

Seeds of Doom

The story at Church Club on wednesday was the Parable of the Sower. For the last few years we’ve played a very satisfying game as part of this session. The floor of the school hall is scattered with seeds and the children are set the task of gathering as many as they can into a plastic beaker each. The beakers are then weighed to determine the winner of the game. Not that they actually win anything other than, as I am fond of warning them to general bemusement ‘a warm glow of self-satisfaction’ but that’s usually enough for six-year-olds. It is a very good game, in that it provides the maximum amount of child activity and occupation with the minimum amount of adult involvement. This week we even got to tidy up while the children were busy. Everyone gets what they want!

But, also this week, an unparalleled event took place: someone cheated at the game. When we came to the weighing-in at the end, John’s plastic cup was unfeasibly full, while a couple of his friends had nothing at all in theirs. ‘John said we should give him our seeds so that he would have more’, they complained. John’s denial of this seemed unconvincing given the unanimous testimony of the others and their completely empty cups, unfeasibly little to show for several minutes of fevered scrabbling on the floor. First place accordingly went to someone else, I’m afraid. Quite apart from John’s cheating it struck me as remarkable that the others went along with it as a perfectly reasonable proposal until after the fact when it struck them that giving him their seeds meant they didn’t have any. ‘we’ve all learned a lesson,’ said Anita who was helping. Yes, I thought, as well as an insight into child development, we now have to build anti-cheating measures into the games.

Bank Holiday Canal Ramble

A very simple photographic post today as I have no brain for anything else: I kept the Bank Holiday on Monday as a mixed observance of some work and some leisure, and went on a walk along the canal to St Catherine's Well and Chapel, a very, very familiar journey but one that always delights with its different views and moods. And it did! As I ate my lunch on the bench next to the a family came past looking at it and pointing out the little yellow flower in the water, which was gratifying as it was one I'd put there. It was still there, somehow stuck in the current, when I came down the hill from saying hello to the Chapel some time later.

Flying a Flag, Perhaps

There is a story that when an archdeacon, or somesuch dignitary, inspected Thaxted church in Essex early during the incumbency of that church’s ‘Red Vicar’, Conrad Noel, to see for himself what all the considerable fuss was about, he asked Noel to justify the presence of the red flag he could see in the chancel. ‘It stands for the Blood of Christ, staining all the nations of the world’, replied the vicar. ‘Very good, Mr Noel,’ admitted the archdeacon, but pressed ‘Then how might you explain the IRA tricolour on the other side?’ No further explanation was forthcoming. Noel does seem later to have put up an amended Red Flag which made matters a bit clearer.

Whatever sympathy I may or may not have with Conrad Noel’s opinions, I have always felt a bit uncomfortable with the display of any symbols in church which aren’t directly related to the Christian religion. This cropped up this weekend when Sylv our pastoral assistant asked to put up a Ukrainian flag and an encouraging message to welcome any Ukrainian guests who might find themselves worshipping with us. I thought this was essentially a nice gesture but the flag turned out to be quite big and its position draped over the church door was very obvious indeed. Of course that was the point. However I did take it down at the end of Sunday evening, folding it up into a box in the entrance area to put out again next week.

This may seem picky and fastidious, but I suppose the root of my discomfort lies – if it’s anywhere other than in my own scepticism and tendency to see the ambiguities and contradictions in any statement or position, including my own – in a feeling that the Christian Church exists to proclaim the Kingdom of Christ, and nothing else: no subsidiary cause, no secondary human organisation, no matter how worthy or admirable. We have to announce the primacy of the Incarnate word, and nothing but, because nobody else will. I don’t even feel that comfortable with our own national flag which plenty of churches fly: even though the Cross of St George has a religious significance (it’s the red of martyrdom against the white field of innocence, and, well, it’s a cross, which is why the Lamb of God carries it as well as St George), its primary meaning now is national, which is why it was one of the other insignia Conrad Noel displayed in Thaxted Church. The blue-and-yellow of Ukraine which is now so familiar to us I can just about cope with as a sign of welcome to a particular group, but that’s as far as it goes. There are loads of causes I could rope Jesus into supporting, from Extinction Rebellion to the Museums Association. But somehow I do not dare!