American Ghosts & Old World Wonders (11 page)

           
If a little merriment imparts itself to the dreams of the villagers, they do not experience it as pleasure. They have exorcised the vegetables, and the slaughtered beasts; they will not tolerate, here, the riot of unreason that used to mark, over there, the inverted season of the year when nights are longer than days and the rivers do not run and you think that when the sun sinks over the rim of the sea it might never come back again.

           
The village raised a silent cry: Avaunt thee! Get thee hence!

           
The riotous ship span round once, twice -- a third time. And then sank, taking its Dionysiac crew with it.

           
But, just as he was about to be engulfed, the Lord of Misrule caught hold of the Christmas pudding that still floated on the water. This Christmas pudding, sprigged with holly, stuffed with currants, raisins, almonds, figs, compressed all the Christmas contraband into one fearful sphere.

           
The Lord of Misrule drew back his arm and bowled the pudding towards the shore.

           
Then he, too, went down. The Atlantic gulped him. The moon set, the snow came down again and it was a night like any other winter night.

           
Except, next morning, before dawn, when all rose to pray in the shivering dark, the little children, thrusting their feet reluctantly into their cold shoes, found a juicy resistance to the progress of their great toes and, investigating further, discovered to their amazed and secret glee, each child a raisin the size of your thumb, wrinkled with its own sweetness, plump as if it had been soaked in brandy, that came from who knows where but might easily have dropped out of the sky during the flight overhead of a disintegrating Christmas pudding.

           
"I"m bored with television," announced Widow Twankey from her easy chair in the Empyrean, switching off
The Late Show
and adjusting his/her falsies inside her outrageous red bustier. "I will descend again to Pantoland!"

                       
In Pantoland,

                       
Everything is grand.

           
Well, let's not exaggerate -- grandish. Not like what it used to be but, then, what is. Even so, all still brightly coloured -- garish, in fact, all your primaries, red, yellow, blue. And all excessive, so that your castle has more turrets than a regular castle, your forest is considerably more impenetrable than the average forest and, not infrequently, your cow has more than its natural share of teats and udders. We're talking multiple projections, here, spikes, sprouts, boobs, bums. It's a bristling world, in Pantoland, either phallic or else demonically, aggressively female and there's something archaic behind it all, archaic in the worst sense. Something positively filthy.

           
But all also two-dimensional, so that Maid Marian's house, in Pantoland's fictive Nottingham, is flat as a pancake. The front door may well open when she goes in, but it makes a hollow sound behind her when she slams it shut and the entire façade gets the shivers. Robin serenades her from below; she opens her window to riposte and what you see behind her of her bedroom is only a painted bedhead on a painted wall.

           
Of course, the real problem here is that it is Baron Hardup of Hardup Hall, father of Cinderella, stepfather of the Ugly Sisters, who, these barren days, all too often occupies the post of Minister of Finance in Pantoland. Occasionally, even now, the free-spenders such as Princess Badroulbador take things into their own hands and then you get some wonderful effects, such as a three-masted galleon in full sail breasting through tumultuous storms with thunder booming and lightning breaking about the spars as the gallant ship takes Dick Whittington and his cat either away from or else back to London amidst a nostalgic series of
tableaux vivants
of British naval heroes such as Raleigh, Drake, Captain Cook and Nelson, discovering things or keeping the Channel safe for English shipping, while Dick gives out a full-throated contralto rendition of "If I had a hammer" with a chorus of rats in masks and tights, courtesy of the Italia Conti school.

           
Illusion and transformation, kitchen into palace with the aid of gauze etc. etc. etc. You know the kind of thing. It all costs money. And, sometimes, as if it were the greatest illusion of all, there might be an incursion of the real. Real horses, perhaps, trotting, neighing and whinnying, large as life. Yet "large as life" isn't the right phrase, at all, at all. "Large as life" they might be, in the context of the auditorium, but when the proscenium arch gapes as wide as the mouth of the ogre in
Jack and the Beanstalk,
those forty white horses pulling the glass coach of the princess look as little and inconsequential as white mice. They are real, all right, but insignificant, and only raise a laugh or round of applause if one of them inadvertently drops dung.

           
And sometimes there'll be a dog, often one of those sandy-coloured, short-haired terriers. On the programmes, it will say: "Chuckles, played by himself," just above where it says: "Cigarettes by Abdullah." (Whatever happened to Abdullah?) Chuckles does everything they taught him at dog-school -- fetches, carries, jumps through a flaming hoop -- but now and then he forgets his script, forgets he lives in Pantoland, remembers he is a real dog precipitated into a wondrous world of draughts and pungency and rustlings. He will run down to the footlights, he will look out over the daisy field of upturned, expectant faces and, after a moment's puzzlement, give a little questioning bark.

           
It was not like this when Toto dropped down into Oz; it is more like it was when Toto landed back, alas, in Kansas. Chuckles does not like it. Chuckles feels let down.

           
Then Robin Hood or Prince Charming or whoever it is has the titular -- and "tits" is the operative word with this one -- ownership of Chuckles in Pantoland, scoops him up against her bosom and he has been saved. He has returned to Pantoland. In Pantoland, he can live for ever.

           
In Pantoland, which is the carnival of the unacknowledged and the fiesta of the repressed, everything is excessive and gender is variable.

A Brief Look at the Citizens of Pantoland

THE DAME

           
Double-sexed and self-sufficient, the Dame, the sacred transvestite of Pantoland, manifests him/herself in a number of guises. For example he/she might introduce him/herself thus:

           
"My name is Widow Twankey." Then sternly adjure the audience: "Smile when you say that!"

           
Because Twankey rhymes with -- pardon me, vicar; and,

                       
Once upon a distant time,

                       
They talked in Pantoland in rhyme. . .

but now they talk in double entendre, which is a language all of its own and is accented, not with the acute or grave, but with the eyebrows. Double entendre. That is, everyday discourse which has been dipped in the infinite riches of a dirty mind.

           
She/he stars as Mother Goose. In
Cinderella,
you get two for the price of one with the Ugly Sisters. If they throw in Cinders' stepmother, that's a bonanza, that's three. Then there is Jack's Mum in
Jack and the Beanstalk
where the presence of cow and stem in close proximity rams home the "phallic mother" aspect of the Dame. The Queen of Hearts (who stole some tarts). Granny in
Red Riding Hood,
where the wolf --
 
"Ooooer!" -- gobbles her up. He/she pops up everywhere in Pantoland, tittering and squealing: "Look out, girls! There's a man!!!" wherever the Principal Boy (q.v.) appears.

           
Big wigs and round spots of rouge on either cheek and eyelashes longer than those of Daisy the Cow; crinolines that dip and sway and support a mass of crispy petticoats out of which comes running Chuckles the Dog dragging behind him a string of sausages plucked, evidently, from the Dame's fundament.

           
"Better out than in."

           
He/she bestrides the stage. His/her enormous footsteps resonate with the antique past. She brings with him the sacred terror inherent in those of his/her avatars such as Lisa Maron, the androgynous god-goddess of the Abomey pantheon; the great god Shango, thunder deity of the Yorubas, who can be either male or female; the sacrificial priest who, in the Congo, dressed like a woman and was called "Grandma".

           
The Dame bends over, whips up her crinolines; she has three pairs of knee-length bloomers, which she wears according to mood.

           
One pair of bloomers is made out of the Union Jack, for the sake of patriotism.

           
The second pair of bloomers is quartered red and black, in memory of Utopia.

           
The third and vastest pair of bloomers is scarlet, with a target on the seat, centred on the arsehole, and
this
pair is wholly dedicated to obscenity.

           
Roars. Screams. Hoots.

           
She turns and curtsies. And what do you know, she/he has shoved a truncheon down her trousers, hasn't she?

           
In Burgundy, in the Middle Ages, they held a Feast of Fools that lasted all through the dead days, that vacant lapse of time during which, according to the hairy-legged mythology of the Norsemen, the sky wolf ate up the sun. By the time the sky wolf puked it up again, a person or persons unknown had fucked the New Year back into being during the days when all the boys wore sprigs of mistletoe in their hats. Filthy work, but
somebody
had to do it. By the fourteenth century, the far-from-hairy-legged Burgundians had forgotten all about the sky wolf, of course; but had they also forgotten the orgiastic non-time of the Solstice, which, once upon a time, was also the time of the Saturnalia, the topsy-turvy time, "the Liberties of December", when master swapped places with slave and anything could happen?

           
The mid-winter carnival in Old Burgundy, known as the Feast of Fools, was reigned over in style by a man dressed as a woman whom they used to call Mère Folle, Crazy Mother.

           
Crazy Mother turns round and curtsies. She pulls the truncheon out of her bloomers. All shriek in terrified delight and turn away their eyes. But when the punters dare to look again, they encounter only his/her seraphic smile and, lo and behold! the truncheon has turned into a magic wand.

           
When Widow Twankey/the Queen of Hearts/Mother Goose taps Daisy the Cow with her wand, Daisy the Cow gives out with a chorus of "Down by the Old Bull and Bush".

THE BEASTS

           
1
 
The Goose
in
Mother Goose
is, or so they say, the Hamlet of animal roles, introspective and moody as only a costive bird straining over its egg might be. There is a full gamut of emotion in the Goose role -- loyalty and devotion to her mother; joy and delight at her own maternity; heartbreak at loss of egg; fear and trembling at the wide variety of gruesome possibilities which might occur if, in the infinite intercouplings of possible texts which occur all the time in the promiscuity of Pantoland, one story effortlessly segues into another story, so that
Mother Goose
twins up with
Jack and the Beanstalk,
involving an egg-hungry ogre, or with
Robin Hood,
incorporating a goose-hungry Sheriff of Nottingham. Note that the Goose, like the Dame, is a female role usually, though not always, played by a man. But the Goose does not represent the exaggerated and parodic femininity of Widow Twankey. The Goose's femininity is real. She is all woman. Witness the centrality of the egg in her life. So the Goose deserves an interpreter with the sophisticated technique and empathy for gender of the
onnagata,
the female impersonators of the Japanese Kabuki theatre, who can make you weep at the sadness inherent in the sleeves of a kimono as they quiver with suppressed emotion at a woman's lot.

           
Because of this, and because she is the prime focus of all attention, the Goose in
Mother Goose
is the premier animal role, even more so than. . .

           
2
 
Dick Whittington's Cat:
Dick Whittington's cat is the Scaramouche of Pantoland, limber, agile, and going on two legs more often than on four to stress his status as intermediary between the world of the animals and our world. If he possesses some of the chthonic ambiguity of all dark messengers between different modes of being, nevertheless he is never less than a perfect valet to his master and hops and skips at Dick's bidding. His is therefore less of a starring role than the Goose, even if his rat-catching activities are central to the action and it is a difficult to imagine Dick without his cat as Morecambe without Wise.

           
Note that this cat is male almost to a fault, unquestionably a tom-cat, and personated by a man; some things are sacrosanct, even in Pantoland. A tom-cat is maleness personified, whereas. . .

           
3
 
Daisy the Cow
is so female it takes two whole men to represent her, one on his own couldn't hack it. The back legs of the pantomime quadruped are traditionally a thankless task, but the front end gets the chance to indulge in all manner of antics, flirting, flattering, fluttering those endless eyelashes and, sometimes, if the coordination between the two ends is good enough, Daisy does a tap-dance, which makes her massive udder with its many dangling teats dip and sway in the most salacious manner, bringing back home the notion of a basic crudely reproductive female sexuality of which those of us who don't lactate often do not like to be reminded. (They have lactation, generation all the time in mind in Pantoland.)

           
This rude femaleness requires two men to mimic it, as I've said; therefore you could call Daisy a Dame, squared.

           
These three are the principal animal leads in Pantoland, although Mother Hubbard, a free-floating Dame who might turn up in any text, always comes accompanied by her dog but, more often than not, Chuckles gets in on the act here, and
real
animals don't count. Pantomime horses can crop up anywhere and mimic rats are not confined to
Dick Whittington
but inhabit Cinderella's kitchen, even drive her coach; there are mice and lizards too. Birds. You need robins to cover up the Babes in the Wood. Emus, you get sometimes. Ducks. You name it.

           
When Pantoland was young, and I mean
really
young, before it got stage-struck, in the time of the sky wolf, when fertility festivals filled up those vacant, dark, solstitial days, we used to see no difference between ourselves and the animals. Bruno the Bear and Felix the Cat walked and talked amongst us. We lived with, we loved, we married the animals
(Beauty and the Beast).
The Goose, the Cat and Daisy the Cow have come to us out of the paradise that little children remember, when we thought we could talk to the animals, to remind us how once we knew that the animals were just as human as we were, and that made us more human too.