“THE PLAY WENT ON”

Evening Star, Issue 23727, 7 November 1940, Page 11

“THE PLAY WENT ON”

“ A friend who lived in southern England, describes the behaviour of the villagers when an air raid failed.to interrupt the local garden fete in aid of the Rod Cross. He writes: ‘We have two or three air raids most days, and we had seven German bombers swoop a few feet over our roofs machine-gun-ning only six days before our fete—so we know something about the blitzkrieg. “ ‘ But we held our fete with stalls, side-shows, dancing on the lawn, and the acting of scenes from “ Twelfth Night ” under the old mulberry tree, which is a stone’s throw from the path still called Princess Gap because Princess Elizabeth used to walk there when she stayed in our village in the days before she became Shakespeare’s Queen Elizabeth. “ ‘ So it was all very much in the English order, and we felt quite secure witli one foot in the sixteenth and the other in the twentieth century as wo listened to the rector’s wife and Tom and Dick and Joyce and Annie transformed under the mulberry tree into Olivia. Malvolio, Sir Toby, Maria. “ ‘ The sun shone from a dear sky, and there were some 250 of ns sitting; on the lawn. There were mothers with babies and there were about 20 or 30 children flaying about and sometimes getting mixed up with the actors. And then just when the clown was singing “ Come Away, Come Away, Death,” the sirens began to wail. “ ‘ Not a soul moved: the play went on. I thought to myself that at least a mother or two would take her children off to shelter. But not a bit of it; they sat there and watched the children sprawling on the lawn as if Goering and his Luftwaffe wore as unreal and innocuous as Malvolio. 1 “ Critic,” in the ‘ New Statesman and Nation.’