The Medieval Murderers - The First Murder

After five years of rationing, the days of buffet lunches on Open Day were a distant memory, but the staff had scraped together enough from their weekly allowances to provide the makings of a few fat- and sugar-free sponge cakes, sandwiches of home-made jam, tomato or tuna, and a fruit salad culled from the produce of their own gardens. Agatha Wood-Turner had contributed wafer-thin margarine sandwiches containing either cucumber or reconstituted egg powder, and Blanche had made patties of mashed potato and corned beef. Christina’s bowl of chocolate biscuits, the American Army wrappers diplomatically removed, was emptied in a flash. All these victuals were washed down with either tea, instant coffee or ‘pop’, while the visitors and staff gossiped, recalled better days in the past and looked forward to better ones in the future.

Some looked curiously at the large black structure occupying much of the dais at the front of the hall. Loftus Maltravers had simulated the medieval stage which had been built either in a town square or outside a priory gate – or on the back of a hay wagon. He had erected what resembled a room-sized four-poster and surrounded it with long curtains, again borrowed after some wrangling from Peter Partridge’s blackout stores. At half-past two, Dr Hieronymus Drabble mounted the two steps to the platform and stood importantly centre stage, in front of the Black Box. After coughing himself hoarse to call the audience to order, he began a tedious monologue of welcome, then extolled the virtues and academic excellence of Waverley College, emphasising the pre-eminent position that the History Department occupied. Before the muttering objections of the other departmental staff became too obvious, he shifted to the high spot of the day’s entertainment, as he called it.

‘You may wonder why we have not provided you with chairs, Vice Principal, ladies and gentlemen, but we always strive for authenticity. Imagine yourselves back when this Play of Adam was first performed in the twelfth century. Then you, as the audience, would have stood in the street, perhaps in front of a crude ox cart or a makeshift stage such as this.’

He swept a hand dramatically at Peter’s black out material behind him, then launched into a reasonable account of mystery and miracle plays and the part that the religious establishment and then the guilds played in the evolution of the theatre.

‘One of my gifted postgraduates, who you will see onstage in a moment, discovered an interesting legend, in that the author of this play, the prior of Oseney Priory in Oxford, added a written warning on the original script that performing this play could lead to some unspecified disaster. So perhaps we should have done it two years ago, when some of you will recall having a soaking when we suffered a cloudburst in the middle of an outdoor performance of part of the York Cycle – appropriately when Noah announced the start of the Deluge!’

He waited for a titter of amusement, but there was only stony silence. Having rounded off his speech with some further platitudes, he bowed himself offstage to put on his robe as narrator, the other members of the cast having already assembled inside the box, through a door at back of the platform.

When the front curtain of the box was hauled up by strings, the Creation was displayed and, with Hieronymus now downstage left in a voluminous cowled cloak, the drama penned eight hundred years earlier began, with Harry filling in the gaps between the actors’ dialogue with a sonorous Latin narration. It went without a hitch. Then Drabble could not resist giving a summary in English of his Latin commentary. The next pastiche was ‘The Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man’, with Christina tempting Peter Partridge with a large Cox’s Orange Pippin.

The format was as before and appeared to be well-received by the audience, other than the small son of the lecturer in Spanish, who in a strident voice, demanded to know when the Demon King was going to pop up through a hole in the floor. The final act was ‘Cain and Abel’, performed with enthusiasm by Peter and Loftus, who after their initial lukewarm acceptance of Harry’s dictat to put the play on, seemed to have vied with each other to inject life and drama into the ancient words. Each was essentially a frustrated actor, turned aside by circumstances into the academic study of the theatre, as an alternative career to treading the boards. With Loftus traditionally in a white robe as the good innocent brother, and the evil Peter swathed in one of his own blackout curtains, they pranced about the stage declaiming the Jacobean translation, while Hieronymus spewed out streams of Latin at one side.

The action began building up to the climax, Cain bitterly complaining about Abel’s better fortune and ability to offer higher quality sacrifices to God. The lethal weapon was already in his hand – for lack of an ass’s jawbone, one of the college archaeologists had loaned a Bronze Age shin-bone from his departmental collection – and Cain was beginning to brandish this threateningly as the acrimonious dialogue reached its peak.

Suddenly, Hieronymus became aware that the attention of the audience had been diverted, some looking about them, others whispering and several edging out towards the exit at the back. The actors on stage also felt that they were losing their grip on the spectators and their speeches faltered, as did Drabble’s haughty stream of Latin.

Above the words as penned hundreds of years before by the prior could now be heard the all-too-familiar ‘thrum-thrum’ of an approaching pulse-jet. Even more menacing was the fact that a moment later, the engine was heard to cut out.

The sudden silence in the hall was far more sinister than the previous droning from above, but was abruptly broken by Peter Partridge’s shouts from the stage. Now incongruously waving the three-thousand-year-old bone, he yelled for everyone to take cover. The cellars of the college were designated as air-raid shelters and the entrance was within a few yards of the lecture hut. Those on stage began to clamber down from the platform and join the orderly but hasty stream of people, now shepherded by Peter as ARP boss and by other members of the staff. Even Harry Drabble dropped his usual posturing to help the older members of the audience to hobble a little faster to the door.

‘How long do you reckon we’ve got, Peter?’ shouted Blanche, as she helped the aged wife of the bursar towards the exits.

‘Can’t tell. Sometimes it’s a couple of minutes, but it can be much less. But it may land a mile away, if we’re lucky.’

As if to mock his hopes, there was a tremendous explosion and a blast of air that blew out many of the windows, though Peter’s sticky tapes prevented a storm of flying glass. Thankfully, the flying bomb had struck three hundred yards in front of the college, so that the big U-shaped building sheltered the hut from the worst of the blast, though it suffered badly itself.

Then, amid screams of fear and terror, came another ear-splitting crash as one of the tall brick chimneys of the college teetered over and fell onto the roof of the lecture hall. It landed on the near end, squarely above the stage. The rafters gave way and the roof structure, plus half a ton of masonry, folded down on to the ‘black box’. By now almost everyone was at the other end near the doors, many already having gained the entrance to the shelter opposite.

Peter Partridge, like the captain of a sinking ship, was last to leave the hut, in his capacity as ARP supremo. He was shepherding out the last straggler and could not resist a last backward glance at the ruination of Loftus’s primitive medieval scenery, just visible in a cloud of cement and brick dust. But also just visible was a shod foot sticking out from under a pile of collapsed blackout curtains – and even more ominous was the flickering of flames at the side of the stage, where the mangled electricity distribution-board had short-circuited and ignited yet more curtains that had fallen onto it.