The First Lockdown Christmas Mystery (#3)

The mystery continues today in Simon Lee's Christmas series. It is running in five daily parts this week. You can find part one here and part two here.

The improvisation being streamed on the Feast of the Holy Family went as follows.

‘Stop, Joseph and Mary! You can’t go any further.’

‘But we must keep going, for the census.’

‘You can’t. It’s Operation Stuck.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The Channel Tunnel and all the ports are closed and the road is too busy because of the end of the Brexit transition period and the virus and everything. So all the donkeys are stuck on the hard shoulder.’

‘Can’t we turn off the motorway?’

‘Go on then but I don’t think you’ll get to where you want to be. What’s it called?’

‘It’s Be … Be … Be … Be-something?’

‘You’re heading in the wrong direction for Beckenham. The only place around here with a name that begins like that is Betteshanger.’

‘Is that in Dover?’

‘No, Deal.’

‘No Deal? Is that the news on Brexit?’

‘No, I mean Betteshanger is near Deal. It’s closer to Deal than to Dover.’

‘Well, we’ll take a diversion if there’s no room here and see if anyone will let us stay.’

So off they went and headed due north towards the sea, intending to stop overnight before travelling eastwards right round the coast the next day to Betteshanger.

‘And another thing, Joseph,’ Mary pointed out forcefully, ‘we need to get our jabs as soon as they are ready, now the news is all about the Kent variant on the virus. Either we get first go at the vaccine or we’ll have to take a flight to Egypt.’

‘Right,’ replied Joseph, ‘I’m looking out for a Vax-Inn, Mary.’

But everywhere was full until they came to Whit-stable. And that was the point when the improvisers really needed the Black Baby Jesus, for the play’s narrator, an angelic figure, to explain that the baby was going to be born in Whitstable as there was no room for them at the inn, while his parents were making their way to Betteshanger.

And lo, there was a beautiful moment of improvisation when the children began to sing, unaccompanied, their version of John Rutter’s Nativity Carol, converting his opening, 'Born in a stable so bare' into ‘Born in Whitstable so bare’, and concluding each verse, not with ‘Born on Christmas Day’ but by singing, with great tenderness, ‘Born so near to Herne Bay’.

As sure as the children on screen now needed to turn to the east, the atmosphere always turns on the fourth day of Christmas. On 28^th December every year, the Catholic Church marks King Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents. Denied by the Magi from knowing the location of the birth of the baby Jesus, King Herod ordered the slaughter of every male child under the age of two.

Everyone knows that the teachers here at St Thomas à Becket Primary School in Canterbury call their head, Mrs Horde, a mixed-up ‘Herod’, but only behind her back. Otherwise, as they often said, they would be dead. Well, now one of them was. If Herod the Head thought there was another star in, or over, the town, she would slaughter you or, if she couldn’t track you down, she would take it out on anyone she could find. Bearing in mind the name of the school, she had been overheard saying that she wished someone would rid her of the school chaplain. Had she now murdered Mr Noel Day?

Caroline Derry Professor Simon Lee

Simon Lee is Professor of Law at The Open University. In the run-up to his 60^th birthday, he re-read and wrote about 60 of his favourite books in 60 days:

https://sixtybookworkout.wordpress.com/