A junior doctor, home from a Christmas night shift on which she verified a death, is made to stand in for her voiceless grandfather as the Doctor in her Wiltshire village's Boxing Day mummers' play, where every year the slain Knight must be brought back to life.
by Joseph Campbell, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Clare Hobday came off the second of her Christmas nights at eight on Boxing Day morning, scraped the windscreen of the Fiesta with her staff card because the scraper had gone the way of all scrapers, and drove the forty minutes from Swindon to Hollam Sallow with the heater roaring and the radio off. There was frost on the verges, a thin white fur on everything the sun had not yet found. At the turn by the water tower a pheasant walked out in front of her with the air of a man who owned the road, and she braked for it, and sat with the engine running after it had gone, and did not know for a moment why she had stopped.
Her grandfather's house stood at the bottom of Church Lane, the last of four stone cottages whose front doors opened straight on to the pavement. The key was under the boot-scraper. The kitchen smelled of toast and Vicks. Walter was at the table in his cardigan and two scarves, and when he saw her he raised both hands as if she had scored a goal, and opened his mouth, and nothing came out of it but a sound like a gate on a dry hinge.
"Oh, Grandad."
He shrugged, enormously. He pushed a pad across the table towards her. He had been writing on it already, for some while; she could see the dents of earlier pages. The top sheet said, in capitals, LARYNGITIS. DR PASCOE SAYS REST IT. HAPPY CHRISTMAS.
She looked at his throat, which is what doctors do instead of hugging, and then hugged him. He was warm and smelled of eucalyptus. She sat down and he poured her tea from the brown pot, and tore off the top sheet, and wrote, and turned the pad round.
YOU'LL DO THE DOCTOR.
"No," Clare said.
He tapped the words with the end of the biro.
"Grandad, I've been awake since yesterday teatime. I'm going to bed. Keith can do it. Roy can do it. Get someone to read it off a card."
He wrote: NOBODY READS IT OFF A CARD.
"Then leave the Doctor out."
He looked at her over his glasses the way he had looked at her when she was nine and had suggested that the Turkish Knight need not actually die.
The play had been done in Hollam Sallow on Boxing Day for as long as anybody could prove and a good deal longer than that. The words were not written down, or rather they had been written down several times, by a curate in 1880 and a woman from the English Folk Dance Society in 1924 and a boy doing a school project in 1987, and none of the three versions agreed with each other or with what was actually said, because what was actually said was what the last man had said, as near as the next man could remember it. Walter Hobday had taken the Doctor from his own father in 1971. He had done it fifty-four times. He had missed one year, 1990, for his hernia, and the village still spoke of the man who stood in for him as though he had been a weather event.
It is one of the oldest things people do. Somewhere in the Nile delta, a long time before anybody wrote a word in Wiltshire, a woman went up and down the river gathering the pieces of her husband so that he might be put back together and live. In Jerusalem the prophet Ezekiel was scandalised to find women at the temple gate weeping for Tammuz, the young god who went down every year and every year came back. In Thrace, in carnival week, well into the last century, a man in goatskins was shot, and mourned over, and got up again, and the village cheered him to his feet exactly as a village in Wiltshire cheers a fencing contractor to his. Nobody in the Wheatsheaf would have put it like that, and nobody needed to. They knew what they came out for. They came out to see a man killed and to watch him rise.
Clare had seen it twenty-seven times, from her mother's hip, from her father's shoulders, from the wall by the cross with a paper cup of mulled wine that she was too young for. She knew every line of it. That was the trouble.
She slept from half past nine until a quarter past eleven, deeply, like falling down a well, and woke with the light wrong and her heart going. When she came downstairs the costume was laid out over the back of the armchair: the frock coat, which had been her great-grandfather's and had been taken in and let out for three generations of stomach; the top hat with its brim gone soft; the black bag with the brass clasp; and, standing by itself on the arm of the chair, the bottle.
It was an old medicine bottle of ridged green glass, the kind the chemist used for poisons when the chemist was a man called Frith. Somebody long ago had pasted a label on it and written ELECAMPANE in copperplate. It held, as it had held every year of her life, Walter's whisky, topped up between stands from the half-bottle in the bag, because the Knight had to drink it when he rose, and the Knight had opinions.
Walter stood in the kitchen doorway with his pad against his chest like a hymn book.
"I'm not saying yes," Clare said, and put on the coat.
It fitted her across the shoulders and hung to her shins. She put on the hat. He looked at her for a long moment, and his mouth moved, and then he gave up on his mouth and wrote, and held it up.
YOUR GREAT-GRANNY WOULD HAVE HAD A FIT.
"Good," said Clare.
At the cross, at noon, there were perhaps sixty people, which for Hollam Sallow was a crowd. The sun had come round on to the green and taken the frost off the grass but not off the shaded side of the churchyard wall, and everybody's breath went up in front of them. Children sat on the steps of the cross in new hats. Somebody's spaniel was trying to eat a sausage roll through a paper bag. There was a smell of woodsmoke and cold mud and the mulled wine that the Wheatsheaf sent out in a tea urn on a trolley.
The side gathered at the lychgate. Roy Stallard, who kept the Wheatsheaf, was Father Christmas, in a red dressing gown with holly pinned to it. Owen Pinnell, who was sixteen and six foot two and doing it for the first time, was King George, with a wooden sword and a cardboard crown that his mother had sprayed gold that morning; you could still smell the paint. Keith Loveday was the Turkish Knight, as he had been for thirty-one years, in a red cloak and a turban made from a striped bath towel, carrying a sword with a real steel blade from an army surplus shop in Devizes that had not been sharp in living memory. Beelzebub was Dave Moss, with a club and a frying pan. Little Devil Doubt was Dave Moss's granddaughter Maisie, who was ten and had a broom.
"Well, Doctor," said Keith, looking her up and down. "You'll want to be quick. The ground's perishing."
"I'm only here because he can't talk."
"We know why you're here," said Keith, not unkindly, and Roy stepped out through the lychgate and into the ring of people and struck the ground with his staff three times, and the talk on the green stopped all at once.
In comes I, old Father Christmas,
Welcome or welcome not.
I hope old Father Christmas
Will never be forgot.
Clare heard it the way she had always heard it, and then, with a lurch, as somebody inside it. The ring of people. The frost on the wall. She was standing where her grandfather stood. She could see, over Roy's shoulder, the gap in the crowd by the war memorial where Walter always put himself at the end of the play to take off his hat, and she thought, with no warning at all, of Mr Alderton in bay four.
He had been eighty-eight. He had come in on the twenty-third with a chest, and on Christmas night, at ten past three, the nurse had rung her to come and verify. It was expected. It was nobody's fault. It was on the list of things a doctor in her second year does on nights, between the potassium and the cannula that had tissued in bay two. She had drawn the curtain. She had put her stethoscope on his chest and listened for a full minute to nothing, and to the chest for breath sounds, and then she had stood beside him for the five minutes the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges requires, watching the second hand of the clock over the bay door, because if anything returns in the five minutes you start the five minutes again. Nothing returned. She had checked his pupils with her pen torch, and pressed above his eyebrow with her thumb, and written the time. 03:26. She had not thought about it since. She had not thought about it on the drive home, or when the pheasant crossed, or when she woke with her heart going. She was a doctor. She was not thinking about it now.
King George had come in and boasted. The Turkish Knight had come in and boasted louder. Owen's voice cracked on I am King George, that noble champion bold, and a man at the back said "Go on, son," and people laughed, and Owen went scarlet and said it again, and got it right, and the crowd applauded him for getting it right, which was more than it had ever done for Keith.
Then they fought. The swords came together with a flat wooden clack and a steel ring. Keith gave ground, and came back, and gave ground, and it was done well, because Keith had done it thirty-one times and had taught Owen in the pub car park on four Thursday evenings with a broom handle. On the third pass Owen's sword went under Keith's arm and Keith let out a roar and went down on to the grass, full length, the way he always did, with a thump you could feel through your boots.
There was the usual silence. The spaniel barked once.
King George looked round the ring. Owen was pale now, as though he really had killed a man, and his voice when it came was not an actor's voice at all.
Is there a doctor to be found,
To cure this deep and deadly wound?
Her grandfather had answered that question fifty-four times, and she had heard twenty-seven of them. She went forward into the ring with the bag in one hand and the hat on her head and the coat dragging a dark line through the wet grass, and she said, because it was the next line and because it came, Yes, there is a doctor to be found, to cure this deep and deadly wound, and her voice was louder than she meant, and steadier, and somebody by the cross said, "That's Walter's girl," in a tone she would think about later.
She knelt by Keith. The cold came straight up through the knees of her jeans. She set the bag down. She was supposed now to make a great show of feeling his head and his feet and inspecting his tongue, and to announce that he had the itch, the stitch, the palsy and the gout, and to quarrel with King George about her fee.
What she did instead, before she had decided to, was put two fingers under the angle of Keith Loveday's jaw.
It was there at once. Strong, a little quick from the fight and the fall, knocking against her fingertips like somebody who has been waiting at a door. She could not take her hand away. Keith lay perfectly still with his eyes shut and his mouth a little open and his bath-towel turban knocked sideways, dead for the good of the parish, and under her fingers his heart went on, and on, and on. She counted without meaning to. Fifteen seconds. Thirty. There were sixty people watching her and not one of them made a sound. She did not know how long she knelt there. Long enough for the silence on the green to change its nature, for it to stop being the silence before a joke and become something else, something that the children on the steps of the cross felt and held still for.
Keith opened one eye.
"Everything all right down there, Doctor?" he said, out of the side of his mouth.
"Seventy-two," said Clare. "Regular."
"Well, that's a relief," said Keith, and closed the eye.
Somebody laughed, and then everybody did, the whole green, the release of it going round the ring like a wave. Clare stood up with wet knees. She found that she was laughing too, and that her nose was running, and her eyes, and she wiped both on the sleeve of her great-grandfather's coat. She turned to King George and demanded ten pounds. He offered her fifteen shillings. She took it, with a bad grace, as the Doctor always had, and then she got out the green bottle and knelt again and pulled the cork with her teeth.
Here, Jack, take a little of my nip-nap,
Pour it down thy tip-tap.
Rise up, Jack, and fight again.
She held the bottle to his mouth. Keith lifted his head and drank Walter's whisky, a good deal more of it than was traditional, and came up off the grass in one movement with his arms flung wide, as though he had been dragged up out of deep water, and the crowd roared him to his feet.
Maisie went round with the frying pan after Beelzebub had threatened everyone with his club. Money I want and money I crave; if you don't give me money I'll sweep you all to your grave. She swept at people's shins with her broom until they paid up. The coins went into the pan with a noise like hail on a shed roof. It was for the church roof and the village hall and, this year, the air ambulance, and Roy would count it in the back bar that evening and announce the total as though it were a general election.
They did the play twice more: in the car park of the Wheatsheaf at two, for the people who had not come to the cross and the people who had and wanted to see it again, and then at four, when the light was going and the frost was coming back down the lane, at the bottom of Church Lane outside the last of the four stone cottages, where they had always done the last stand, since before Walter's father.
He was on his doorstep in his coat and both scarves and a woolly hat, with his pad. When Keith went down on the pavement Clare did not check his pulse. She did the Doctor's business with the head and the feet and the tongue, and diagnosed the itch, the stitch, the palsy and the gout, and quarrelled about her fee, and gave him the nip-nap, and he rose. Walter clapped his gloved hands together without a sound. Maisie held the frying pan out to him and he put a folded note in it, as he did every year, and waved Dave's club away.
Afterwards the side went off up the lane towards the Wheatsheaf, Owen in front with his crown under his arm, and Keith shouting back to her that she owed him a drink for the drop she'd spilt. Clare stayed where she was. Her feet had gone. The coat smelled of three generations of Hobdays and of Keith's whisky down the front of it.
Walter was writing on the pad. He turned it round and held it up to her under the street lamp, which had just come on and was still pink.
PULSE?
She looked at him. He looked back over his glasses. There was no telling, with Walter, how much he had seen from a doorstep, or in fifty-five years, or in 1971, when he knelt in the grass for the first time with his own father standing in the gap by the war memorial with his hat in his hand.
She took the biro from behind his ear and wrote on the pad, under his word, against his chest, while he held it for her.
72. REGULAR.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Octōbrēs (30 September 2026), ā Iōsēphō Campbellō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Joseph Campbell, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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