By early December rehearsals for the school play would be in full swing. I can't remember them all but there are a few highlights in the memory box.
At my first Christmas at Priory Lane Infant School I had a starring role in my class's performance at the school concert. As many of my classmates were still only four even though I had achieved the dignity of five, we didn't do a play, we just sang, "I had a little nut tree" and I was the child chosen to carry the golden pear and skip around the outside of the circle whilst the whole class sang.
A couple of years later we were all old hands at school plays and I was in some sort of crowd milling around in Bethlehem. That was until my classmate Philip proved incapable of learning his lines as the inn-keeper so I got the stunning words, "We haven't got any room." Really I wanted to be Mary.
Junior School saw me in the seven to eight year olds play as Princess April. I had two qualifications for that - very long fair hair and I could remember my words of which there were a lot.
In my final year at Junior School one of the teachers had been on a course on puppetry so we all made puppets for a performance of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin". We performed using a tape recording of the poem so there was no need to learn lines by heart and my particular skill was unneeded. Long blond hair was irrelevant. I ended my school drama career ignominiously as the controller of a rat.
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