House of Small Shadows

TWENTY-THREE

And here she was again in a room she would not believe existed unless sat inside it.

Ten small wooden chairs had been arranged in two neat rows. Children’s chairs. White chairs with upright animals in human clothes hand-painted upon them, a familiar motif.

Catherine sat on one of two upholstered seats made for adults, placed either side of a projector that belonged in a museum of cinema. And this is where Edith’s mother and uncle must once have sat together, presumably with their inanimate cast gathered around them, to watch recorded performances of what Edith had called the ‘cruelty plays’. Maude had been waiting to start the show after Catherine was done in the nursery.

A white sheet served as a screen, replacing the backcloth of Mason’s intact puppet theatre, a large structure that filled the width of the room, created from detachable parts to allow transportation between the house and rear lawn. The visible larger framework, bridge and proscenium, were constructed of wood and carefully painted in a regal gold and red. A rich purple drapery in the wings allowed for scene changes.

In itself, the theatre was a work of art that deserved display, and was much bigger than the German and Italian marionette theatres Catherine had seen daily while working at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green.

Edith wasn’t going to last for ever, which made her wonder if any provision had been made for the care of this side of M. H. Mason’s work. Heirs had not been mentioned and the theatre troupe was not for sale. So what would become of this final evolution of her uncle’s weird vision?

Before leaving her alone in the ‘theatre’ Edith told her of the BBC’s visit to the Red House after the war. Which produced a great deal of excitement for her uncle, followed by an equal share of disappointment. According to Edith, during M. H. Mason’s visits to a cinema, in Hereford, during the Second World War, he identified a new medium for communicating his obscure work to a wider audience. The rats’ gruesome pleas for world peace had backfired, but he’d subsequently moved on to bigger things. Or so he’d thought at the time. A message his niece and curator didn’t appear wholly cognisant of either. But the film crew from the BBC, who were invited to film his marionette dramas, never returned after the first visit, or broadcast whatever footage they left the Red House with.

Edith may not have pitched it to her on those terms, but Catherine’s interpretation of the facts suggested one visit to the Red House had been enough for the BBC. And she now sympathized with the film crew’s decision as an unpleasant tension mounted inside her while sat before the screen, an apprehension of impending discomfort.

When Edith was wheeled out of the room by Maude, in cynical preparation for what she called ‘a masterpiece’, she’d added, ‘This is the only copy we have. It was deemed too upsetting for children.’ A reminder of which inspired rage in the invalid. ‘My uncle never said it was for children! They assumed, as all fools do, that his theatre was a simple entertainment for infants. They were as imbecilic as the audience they believed it intended for!’

The outburst left Catherine wondering if the master version of the film still existed in the BBC archive. But one copy had survived here and such was the excitement created by the reel’s arrival in ‘1950-something’, a projector had been purchased by Mason when funds were more plentiful. A projector that still worked.

This was to be a private performance that Edith and the projectionist did not wish to see. Their departure from the room had been swift. Maybe they were bored of it. The film appeared to be one of few entertainments in the Red House, so the household may already have watched it to death. But as Catherine wondered whether Edith had ever known television, or radio, or music in her life, her attention was seized by the activity on-screen.

If the opening shot was a statement of intent, Catherine would have been happy to miss all of what followed the first image, filling the length and breadth of the screen. A smiling face of painted plaster, in black and white.

Dropout, flickers and degeneration of the film suggested it had been made much earlier than the fifties, as did the absence of sound. The eyes in the face on-screen must once have been intended to convey delight, or a cheeky joy, but their expression had faded. Rounded babyish features, including rouged cheeks, were networked with black cracks. The nose was gone. In its place was an ugly hole. The dim, immobile grin suggested a cruel delight at the viewer’s shock.

The hair resembled a clumsy toupee, a modern clownish addition, lacquered or greased either side of a central parting. It was an old head and probably manufactured before Mason’s time, but Catherine had dreamed of something similar before. In her memory, it jerked awake a sense of something from her trances about the children of the special school. And had this marionette been concealed beneath bedclothes in the nursery that morning too? When she recalled the mop of curly black hair upon a pillow, she winced. The comparisons made her flutter with panic, then frown with incredulity, before considering the absurd possibility of a connection between the film and her hallucinations and trances. A connection she quickly dismissed. At one time ventriloquist dummies and male puppets all had that kind of head, nor was the hairstyle uncommon. She’d seen a bonnet in the nursery, too, but female dolls from the 1880s also wore bonnets. Though what had first put such figures and images into her imagination as a child still baffled her.

The camera withdrew and the remainder of the figure was revealed. Catherine shifted upon her seat. The neck ruffle and tatty velvet jacket signified Tudor stylings, but the legs were pure M. H. Mason. The hind legs of a large dog supported the upper body of the figure, which began to soundlessly clap its chipped wooden hands as it withdrew to the side of the stage.

Unsteady, tottering, but with a rotation of the hips that was uncomfortable to watch, the movements of the figure were reminiscent of a circus dog trained to walk upon its hind legs. Catherine thought she saw strings, but then the bright flickers may also have been flashes of dropout on damaged film stock.

A curtain was drawn back to the wings of what she realized was the very same stage at the head of the room she faced. But in the film the stage backcloth depicted a dungeon in great detail, replete with wet stones and a solitary barred window. Pieces of wooden scenery had rolled down from above.

Hung in chains, a bedraggled, limp figure struggled to raise its wooden head and look at the camera. The face was stained with a dark fluid and the features were partially obscured. But what she could see of the carven face was neatly bearded, like an Elizabethan man. The figure’s countenance was sad but noble, if not regal, and made her think of both Christ and King Charles I.

About the sombre refined face, dark and luxuriant curls fell across a soiled linen blouse. A pair of tattered leggings completed the outfit. The carven feet were large, exaggerated, hoary.

The head tilted and moved as if it spoke. If there had been sound on the film perhaps the prisoner would have been imparting its woes, though Catherine found herself relieved the audio track was absent.

The curtains closed. Then reopened.

In the second scene, the imprisoned figure appeared even more wretched and mournful in appearance as it stood in the wooden dock of a court or aged public building. There was a second character onstage for this scene. A monstrous hare which gesticulated aggressively with its thin forelegs. Large and entirely white eyes dominated the hare’s head. Remnants of whiskers bristled around an open black mouth that boasted small teeth. She must have just seen its foul head in a nursery bed too.

Its sagging body stretched out of a small wooden box that doubled as a pulpit. The fur of the chest was patchy and worn and revealed two lines of pale teats. The hare wore a black cloth or silken headdress, and must have been presiding in judgement over the man who remained the only distinctly human figure in the scenes that followed.

Once the curtains reopened after the trial scene, the action of the play had moved to a murky refuse-strewn street scene, with churned mud and slouching wooden houses artfully suggested upon the backcloth. The prisoner was now mounted upon a cartwheel, over the rim of which his tired but proud wooden face hung.

The scenery may have changed, and though well painted, the new backcloth added the only reassuringly artificial aspect to the jerky, but unnervingly lifelike motion of the marionettes on stage. So authentic was their propulsion about the space, Catherine became convinced the film had been created with still-frame animation, not puppetry. After all, Edith’s memory could hardly be counted upon.

A motley crowd of figures dressed in rags paraded onto the stage from the wings and circled the cartwheel menacingly. Catherine caught glimpses of sackcloth and ceramic faces, wooden teeth, and animal ears. Several of the crowd had canine legs. Others moved on wooden limbs, their feet shod in pointed leather shoes.

Small white hands and the occasional bristled paw were thrown into the air to shake clubs. The crowd was stoked into an animal frenzy by the hare, which pranced and frolicked at one side of the stage. It was presiding over a second scene and appeared gleeful to do so.

With their scruffy backs to the audience, the rabble crowded about and obscured the man upon the cartwheel. Their thin arms rose and fell repeatedly as they assaulted the prisoner.

Catherine covered her eyes and only peered back intermittently through her fingers until the slaughter had concluded. The exhausted crowd of ruffians staggered away after an awful minute of eager violence.

The thin wooden limbs of the victim had been smashed. Splinters protruded through its scant garments and were dark and moist.

Catherine assumed that it was at this point in the performance of Mason’s cruelty play that the BBC director must have finally, perhaps reluctantly, realized the drama was not only unsuitable for children, but for anyone.

Despite the wear on the print, which now lightened and darkened as if the film was about to catch fire on the projector, Catherine struggled to watch as the broken figure was raised into the air by the mob. An evil crowd that struggled under the weight of the cumbersome pole upon which the wheel had been fixed.

The curtains fell. But didn’t remain drawn for long.

The lifeless, misshapen and wet figure reappeared still strapped to the cartwheel upon the upright stave. But high up, on centre stage, the pole was set against a backcloth that was either entirely black or craftily designed to reflect a cold nothingness. And she wondered again if that forlorn wooden face now issued a soliloquy to camera on the missing audio track, because although his body was terribly broken, the glass eyes of the long face were open.

Catherine longed for the end, but worse was in store.

In the next scene, against a return of the town’s backcloth, the anthropomorphic horde in rags returned to attend to the remains of their victim, who it seemed had been left to reflect overnight, beneath the featureless sky, on its tortured state. But this time the crowd approached the cartwheel in a representation of awe and reverence. They began to prod and study the broken man.

The first figure to distinguish itself from the shabby peasants was hooded and reached out a long pair of furred arms to seize and snatch away the head of the executed prisoner. The thief then crept to the front of the stage and caressed the long tresses of the stolen head with its black hands. But what was more appalling than the careful stroking of the leathery fingers through the feminine curls was the dark ape-like face that leered out of its hood to bare teeth at the audience. At some point it appeared Mason had come into possession of a primate.

Behind the monkey beggar clutching the disembodied head, the rest of the cast began pulling at, shaking, and tugging the remains of the executed man until he came apart in their mostly wooden hands. At one point the plucking of his parts became a frenzy.

Once a substantial item had been secured, and often from the ground it had fallen to, the piece would be snatched up and coveted against the chest of a peasant and carried off by the scuttling, hunched-over figure, seemingly in rapture with its booty. One by one, the marionettes departed the stage until nothing remained on the cartwheel or the horrible ground below.

The Master of Revels who opened the performance returned for the final scene, and took quick steps on its hind legs to centre stage. Once in place, it directed the audience’s attention to the collection of ornaments and cases mounted upon little Doric pedestals across the rear of the stage. The receptacles had been painted and designed to resemble ornate jewellery boxes or elaborate urns. One object resembled a book, opened to reveal a tiny skeletal hand where there should have been pages. A gilded box fitted with a glass screen contained a foot. A small trunk lined with a silken material stored a jaw bone. She understood this to be a reliquary of the condemned man’s constituent parts.

Catherine’s curiosity about the identity of the condemned, executed, dismembered, and now martyred man was overshadowed by her deep concern for the damaged mind behind this portrayal of the character’s hideous end in the filthy street. Mason may have changed his medium from rats to marionettes, but the themes appeared to be the same.

The film flickered to an end and Catherine groped her way to the light switch. Behind her, the loose end of the film slapped in a still-turning reel. The screen glared white.