When the great night came, the whole population of the neighbourhood assembled, for it was the only public entertainment of the year. Squire and his Negro Minstrel Troupe was the great attraction. They went on, dressed in red and blue, their hands and faces blackened with burnt cork, and rattled their bones and cracked their jokes and sang such songs as:

A friend of Darwin’s came to me,

A million years ago said he

You had a tail and no great toe.

I answered him, ‘That may be so,

But I’ve one now, I’ll let you know—

G-r-r-r-r-r out!’

Very few in the audience had heard of Darwin or his theory; but they all knew what “G-r-r-r-r-r out!” meant, especially when emphasised by a kick on Tom Binns’s backside by Squire’s boot. The schoolroom rocked. “I pretty well busted me sides wi’ laughin’,” they said afterwards.

After the applause had died down, a little bell would ring and a robust curate from a neighbouring village would announce the next item. Most of these were piano pieces, played singly, or as duets, by young ladies in white evening frocks, cut in a modest V at the neck, and white kid gloves reaching to the elbow. As their contributions to the programme were announced, they would rise from the front seat in the audience; a gentleman—two gentlemen—would spring forward, and between them hand the fair performer up the three shallow steps which led to the platform and hand her over to yet another gentleman, who led her to the piano and held her gloves and fan and turned her music pages.

“Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,” went the piano, and “Warble, warble, warble” went the voices, as the performers worked their conscientious way through the show piano pieces and popular drawing-room ballads of the moment. Each performer was greeted and dismissed with a round of applause, which served the double purpose of encouraging the singer and relieving the boredom of the audience. Youths and young men in the back seats would sometimes carry this too far, drowning the programme with their stamping and shouting until they had to be reprimanded, when they would subside sulkily, complaining, “Us’ve paid our sixpences, ain’t we?”

Once, when the athletic curate sang “You should see Me dance the Polka” he accompanied the song with such violent action that he polked part of the platform down and left the double row of schoolgirls hanging in the air on the backmost planks while he finished his song on the floor:

You should see me dance the polka,

You should see me cover the ground,

You should see my coat tails flying

As I dance my way around.

Edmund and Laura had the words and actions by heart, if not the tune, and polked that night in their mother’s bedroom until they woke up the baby and were slapped. A sad ending to an evening of pure bliss.