Derwent put his arm as far as he could around their son Ryan, Beattie held her handbag in both hands and my stomach bulged out in such sympathy I wished I worn bigger knickers. Even Stella held her breath as we inched pie by pie towards the magic 120.
At 119 both women squirmed. At 120 both women shut their eyes tight. By the time they reached 121 they’d both turned that terrifying shade of green that heralds sudden and projectile vomiting. There was a trickle of juice down Karen’s chin. An undigested raisin slid into Gert’s cleavage. Karen rocked. Gert wobbled. The crowd held their breath and the wise ones took a step back as the combined force of 240 mince pies prepared to hurtle towards the judges table.
Karen may have only equalled her own record but like all great husband and wife partnerships taking Derwent’s advice to vomit into the wind gained her that vital one hundredth of a second and pride was restored to Biddermouth.
Of course how the rest of the world will view us now Bez has gone viral we do not know but she needs to learn that there is a world of difference between looking traumatised and looking full of yourself especially with your breasts exposed in a selfie. Sounds like a set up to me.
Dark Forces Ruin Christmas
You could be forgiven for thinking that there are Dark Forces out to ruin Christmas in Biddermouth on Sea. What should normally be a joyous time of year has been spoiled for the rest of us by a handful of professional agitators.
I am quite sure that when Lila Morris’s daughter Bez ( and her partner Caz and infant son Waz) started all this breast feeding hoo-ha in Stirrup and Morley’s Tea Room she just thought she was being her usual bolshie self and hogging the limelight. However since the professional feeders have latched on to her it has become a very different story and Bez, who has a reputation for trouble making anyway is obviously punching dangerously above her weight.
These women are what Vera calls ‘hard core’ and it seems that Bez is paying a very high price for being their latest poster girl. Having claimed to all and sundry to have been so traumatised by the experience she can no longer be seen leaving the house. Bez is also having professional coaching on how to appear distressed in her Face Book photographs. I thought it was only me and Kevin that thought she looked smug but apparently not.
And other lives are being affected too. Caz, her partner found herself pelted with bread rolls by some pro-bottlers who chased her round the supermarket and poor little Waz will have to grow up known as the ‘Donor Sperm Baby’ for the rest of his life having been splashed across the front of the national newspapers. As for poor Lila and her husband, having TV crews camped in your back yard cannot be easy when you still have an outside toilet.
Also the silent majority of tactful breast feeders have been made to feel that bonding with their infants in the luxury of the Mother and Baby Room or under cover of a discrete shawl is letting the side down and their commitment to motherhood has been called into question.
Anyway one thing led to another. News got round that that the professional feeders were coming from Southampton to organise a ‘feed-in’ at Stirrup and Morley’s and somebody, probably Stella Wheatley, staged a counter protest so that when the women arrived they found the tearoom full of men. At least they looked like men that would know Stella, socially and biblically. Not that that stopped the women as they sat on the floor making life very hard for the waitresses to serve the morning coffee. It also made it impossible for the pro-bottlers who had brought re-enforcements from all over the county to get any further than the 4th floor lighting department, which was where I lost my neighbour Beattie who was determined to get 60w bayonet bulbs come hell, high water or a very bewildered presenter from News At Ten.
The odd thing was that some of the pro-feeders didn’t actually have children of their own to feed. One of them was a man. Still as he said on camera, ‘you didn’t have to suffer FGM to know it hurt and was morally wrong.’
‘That one used to be Greenpeace and Ban the Bomb,’ said my friend Kevin who had turned up to see what all the fuss was about. ‘Then he was Civil Liberties until he finally found somebody to sleep with then for a while he was quite normal. I suppose him and Dean have split up which is why he’s back to being a professional misery.’
I can’t say that either side did themselves any favours, especially amongst those of us that had a fair bit of shopping to do that day. Stirrup and Morley’s must have lost a good deal of money, the market was cut off by huge wagons with satellite dishes on their roofs, and you couldn’t get into Sainsbury’s because several of the protesters came with Pit Bull Terriers that they tied to the railings.
However Stella’s men chanting ‘Get your tits out for the boys’ could hardly be called a moral victory because I think it was this that sparked off the scuffle that knocked over the Christmas tree in the first place. Being lit up at the time didn’t help either as it sent a shower of sparks on to the Nativity Scene below destroying the Three Wise Men and two shepherds. Luckily the straw was damp due to the weather so the Holy Family avoided going up in flames. However that didn’t stop them being trodden underfoot as the Pro-feeders and the Pro- bottlers clashed in the market place.
The sad thing is all this could have been avoided in the first place, but no, Bez Morris has to make herself the centre of attraction and now nervous café owners are putting up signs saying no children under 12 allowed just to be on the safe side, spoiling it for everybody.
It’s also spoiled the Nativity Scene for next week’s carol concert as we think Baby Jesus may have got swept up in the rubbish when the bin-men tried to do a bit of tidying up. The Vicar of St Matthews and All Angels has offered a small reward so please keep your eyes peeled, he’s about twelve inches long and believed to have a boot print across his forehead. Regardless of condition we would dearly like him back.
Panto Dilemma
Like all English towns Biddermouth on Sea’s festive season wouldn’t be complete without its annual Christmas Pantomime at the Town Hall Theatre, and this year the tradition was being kept alive with a production of ‘Aladdin in the Woods’.
I was looking forward to it for two reasons. Firstly having a bit of show biz in my veins from my time on the Fun Fair I’ve always enjoyed a good show and secondly it meant that Beattie, Hilary, Vera, Lila and myself had managed to get through the whole festive calendar and were still speaking to each other.
Normally, this close to Christmas, one of them isn’t talking to somebody and between you and me it’s been a pretty close run thing this year what with Hilary and Vera falling out over the Nativity Play and all that trouble Lila’s daughter, Bez, caused breastfeeding in Stirrup and Morley’s tea room. Not that my next door neighbour Beattie has behaved like a saint either. It was only a spot of emergency bridge work on her canines that stopped her taking a nip out of Vera when she discovered that she was the one who took all Beattie’s decorations off the tree at the Over 60’s club and replaced them with her own.
‘Tonal’, Vera had said.
‘Tawdry,’ said Beattie. But that was later when she was reunited with her part denture and by then the moment for biting had passed. However I could tell that she hadn’t forgotten the incident and I’m sure Vera got the message when she opened her Christmas card. I know it was sold in aid of leprosy but even I thought that elf was more hideously disfigured than necessary.
Fortunately Beattie sent me one from Save the Children with a very nice picture of Jesus on it, I think, supposedly drawn by a blind girl in Nigeria. That was why I gave it pride of place on my mantelpiece. Well actually that wasn’t the real reason at all. To be honest I was feeling guilty. Not because I had 20/20 vision but because Beattie and I had had a bit of a falling out and in a fit of pique I’d sent her that card with a huge Robin on the front knowing full well that she saw them as birds of ill omen.
However Christmas cards aside, the problem with the Biddermouth panto was that each year the cast got less and less famous. Vera and Hilary could both remember the year Cilla Bl
ack had played Dick and by all accounts she’d had much better legs than Lulu who’d stood in for Kathy Kirby at the last minute the following season.
‘Not that we went to see her, ‘said Vera.
‘In case she tried to sing, ‘added Hilary.
Mind you Beattie’s memories went even further back. She could remember Russ Conway playing ‘Side Saddle’ and Arthur Askey playing ‘Widow Twanky.’
‘We never saw you there!’ said Vera.
‘Well you were probably in the stalls,’ said Beattie and for a while a very un-festive silence threatened to derail our pantomime plans for 2015.
However this year the star of the show was somebody called Chardonnay McMichael. Now who she was and why she was billed as a celebrity nobody really knew. At first we thought she’d been a Blue Peter presenter but as Beattie pointed out Valerie Singleton would never have shown that much cleavage in a poster. Then Vera remembered she’d been the girl in East Enders who’d married her own brother, got addicted to cocaine and ended up being hit by tram.
‘That was Coronation Street,’ said Lila, ‘and she certainly wasn’t in that!’
Anyway it turned out that Kevin from the Bona Curl remembered her playing the patient in the bed next to Hannah Gordon in ‘Casualty’.
‘Not that she had any lines,’ he said. ‘Every time she was in shot she had a thermometer in her mouth. Anyway why don’t you all come to the panto at the Jolly Seaman? Johnnie and Franz are doing ‘A Lad in the Gents’ and Stella Wheatley’s playing, ‘Penny Scillin ‘, The Fairy Godmother.
‘And what are you playing?’ Beattie wanted to know.
‘Dick Throbbing’, said Kevin and we all wished she’d never asked.
So there we were, all on the horns of a pantomime induced dilemma. Did we raise money for AIDS research and sit through Stella mangling her way through ‘ I am what I am,’ which she did every year, or did we spend good money to see somebody who may or may not have been sucking a thermometer in the bed next to Hannah Gordon?
In the end it was Beattie’s local government connections and free tickets that won the day.
‘Just think if my late Arthur hadn’t been Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce for twenty years you’d all be sitting with the unemployed in those cheap seats they keep back for the concessions and holding handkerchiefs to your noses to hide the smell of cut price cider. ’
Well for somebody who’s claim to fame was sucking a thermometer Ms McMichael didn’t do too bad a job and although she’ll never be the next Cilla Black everybody agreed she was better than Lulu. True, there was a nasty moment when her harness got entangled in a spot light but fortunately one of the Shetland ponies pulling the coach relieved itself at the same time which made all the kids laugh.
And over at the Jolly Seaman? Well by all accounts our Stella went down a storm, especially when she pitched head first into the crowd having had one Malibu and Pineapple too many in the dressing room. Johnny and Franz fell out of the new barman from Latvia and everybody yelled, ‘He’s Behind You!’ each time Kevin came on stage.
It may be nothing like show business but we‘re all secretly glad that panto is still alive and kicking in Biddermouth even if we don’t know who’s in it.
Biddermouth Christmas Legends
Like all communities in the south of England Biddermouth and its nearby villages have a long and proud tradition of their own Christmas rituals and like many still practised today these have their origins in our distant pagan past.
A recent article in The Biddermouth Gazette by our local historian Rose Milner ( who also acts as the town’s librarian) had this to say.
The Rolling of the Infant
Across the bay in Curston this was still practiced until the late 1950’s. In this ritual, local mothers would compete for a round of mature cheese or more latterly a television set by rolling their youngest child downhill in a barrel. Various theories have been put forward to the origins of this ancient tradition with many claiming this to be a re-enactment of ‘the miracle of the cheesing’ as recorded in The Chronicles of Peter the Monk in 878 AD.
According to the ancient manuscript preserved in the Curston Museum, during a time of great famine and pestilence Vigdis, a local village maiden who believed her life and virginity to be in constant danger, once saw a group of strange men approaching the village and jumped into a barrel to escape their unwanted attentions. Unfortunately, having been blessed with big hips, she found it impossible to get herself back out of it once all threat of danger had passed. Rocking from side to side in an attempt to extricate herself caused the barrel to ‘topleth ovyre mightily’ and roll down the hill with the hapless Vigdis inside it.
When the barrel finally banged to a halt on some rocks it burst open to reveal not the bloody and battered remains of the village virgin but an enormous cheese wrapped in a large pair of what scholars have translated as ‘undergarments’, a cheese that by some miracle continued to fed the entire village until the next harvest was safely gathered in.
Another theory, and one vigorously supported by Professor Moona Peering of the Hampshire School of Women’s Revisionist Studies, is that the ‘rolling’ was a primitive form of population control exercised by desperate mothers with no access to birth control. It may even have been an early example of gender selection as claimed in the professor’s latest book, ‘Medieval Lesbians. Airbrushed from History’, because the records show a higher number of fatalities amongst girls than boys, although some of the names appear to have been written in biro which casts doubt on their historical authenticity, especially those of Chardonnay, Chelsea and Kylie.
The last known surviving ‘infant’, Rhona Pugsley recently had her retrospective claim for injuries against the local council upheld in a landmark victory by the European Court in Strasbourg. The ruling being based on the fact that ‘ no one told my mum it was dangerous’ and the evidence that the council had repeatedly made no provision to clear the route of sharp rocks before the ‘rolling’ took place.
Beating the Christmas Bounds
Up the road in Abbots Sepsis the ‘bounds’ or parish boundary was marked by four ancient Holly Trees. In medieval times an elderly spinster was thrown into one of each of them on Boxing Day to ward off evil spirits. More latterly this practise became part of a mayoral pageant, and the chosen four were allowed to wrap themselves in stout wool blankets. The last Abbots Sepsis resident to be ‘bounded’ was Miss Evelyn Chandler who died in 1917 during the areas only zeppelin raid when she fell off a ladder trying to puncture the dirigible with a pitchfork. The Holly trees were cut down as part of a road widening scheme in the 1930’s although there is rumoured to be several photographs of ‘Miss Chandler’s Bush‘ in the hands of a private collector.
A slap up meal
In Lower Blyster married men would slap their wives to celebrate the festive season as a way of persuading God to provide a full and bountiful table on Christmas Day. Unlike normal work-a-day wife beating this took place at the cross-roads in day light on the spot now occupied by the ‘Loving Hand’ public house.
Published in 1856, ‘A Hampshire Traveller’s Tale’ records the story of one Margaret Ratby of Slug Wash Farm who being a stranger to the village and knowing nothing of its traditions ‘smote her husband back so hard with an axe that his head ‘fell from his shoulders in a pool of blood thereof.’ She was also the last woman to be transported to Australia from these parts.
The Biddermouth Tree
(Reprinted courtesy of Rose Milner – Biddermouth historian and local librarian
Another fine example of Biddermouth’s ancient pagan past can be found in the stained glass window believed to have come from the Lady Chapel of the church of St Catherine which once stood at the crossroads on the site now occupied by Barclays Bank and is the earliest known depiction of the Biddermouth Christmas Tree.
This rare example of the glaziers craft celebrates the day Joseph of Arimathea planted his walking stick in our fertile south coast soil c
ausing it to burst forth into life and, Lo! The legendary Biddermouth Tree was born. However many claim that the tree itself grew from a fragment of the Holy Cross that was dropped by Mary Magdalen when she visited the area on her way to what later became Newcastle. This alternative view is based on the discovery in the 15th century of a pair of rather tarty looking shoes and a copper make-up mirror buried in the soil near the trees roots. This was also used to explain why the tree would burst into flower on Christmas Day and at no other time of year.
Regardless of its origins the tree was seen by many as possessing miraculous powers and from as far back as 878 AD there are tales of parents hanging their sick infants from its branches over night as a cure for a range of ailments including rickets and what we now believe to be Whooping Cough. Those that survived were considered blessed. Those that did not were deemed to have been taken directly by the Lord himself. The last recorded child to be hung there was one George Flange in 1828 although two more discovered in 1956 were believed to be the work of an inmate that had escaped from a nearby asylum.
You would still be able to see the tree today had it not stood for two thousand years on the site now occupied by the railway station extension. However a plaque on the floor of Costa Coffee now marks the spot where this ancient specimen once flourished.
The tree standing in the garden owned by Mr and Mrs Desmond Trilby is claimed to have been raised from a cutting taken by Mrs Trilby’s grandfather in the late 1800’s. The fact that it bears a healthy crop of Victoria Plums each August is seen by many as further evidence that God does indeed work in mysterious ways.
The Dowsing of the Virgin
(Reprinted courtesy of Rose Milner – Biddermouth historian and local librarian
Whilst our south coast neighbours may go in for ‘rolling’, ‘bouncing’ and ‘slapping’ as ways to combine a pagan past with a Christian present, here in Biddermouth on Sea we are proud to say that we still celebrate the Monday before Christmas with the annual ‘Dowsing of the Virgin’. Like many of our great English traditions this has its origins in the early conflicts between the Saxons and the in-coming Christian church and was first recorded in ‘The Chronicles of Peter the Monk’ in 878 A.D although it is believed to have been part of an oral tradition dating back to the 5th Century.