Religion and Music

I'd been to an awful lot of Catholic/Church of England churches this trip, but our Religion Professor had asked us to go to a different church while we were in London.  It was really for extra credit, but I was curious, so on the 26th, Nicole and I struck out for John Wesley's Methodist chapel.  Here is a photo of him:

His parish is my campus, being from BYU.  (Due to picture quality/size, you may not be able to see that underneath the photo, it says The World is my Parish.) The basement of this place had a lot of information on the founding of the Methodist church and a video; John Wesley started the church, but his brother and a group of friends started the idea.  They were called Methodists because they lived according to a rather strict "method" of life that was, as far as I could see, very faith-filled and service-based. The chapel had preserved the original chapel, as seen below.

 Incidentally, this is where some of the first LDS missionaries taught, until they baptized so many people the preachers decided they were at risk of losing their congregations and kicked them out.  I thought the window on the ceiling was pretty, too, and here that is.

 We also saw his grave in the back, which has several other people in it, too.

 After that, Nicole and I both decided we wanted to head out a little further and visit another location of interest.

 Quite frankly, I feel bad for anyone who lives near there.  This was the end of November, not exactly prime tourism season, and the cars still had to wait five minutes per car with all the people crossing the road there.  And standing in the middle of the road.  So we just leaned over and got our pictures when the traffic was low on that road.

We also saw the Beatles' Abbey Road studio, which has graffiti all over the wall that probably added an inch of thickness to the concrete.  And they had lots of security.  It was quite a lot of fun, though.

I also worked on my final project for art--it involved drawing something from a few different points of view, and I'd finally found a good pattern for arranging it after seeing a picture in the museum at Oxford whose underlying structure was something like this <. It was a picture of Gabriel on the point fighting a dragon representing Satan, while on the other side were representations of heaven and hell, and the picture divided going up or down.  I decided to structure mine like this >, with five boxes coming to a point.

Essay Essay

As promised, the essay I read in class.  Just to warn you, it's random and wandering, and you may have seen it on my alternate FB page.  It's unrevised, and if you read/understand it, you'll probably understand why.

You know what? Essays are starting to annoy me. I start writing something, I feel like I have a good idea going, and suddenly everything I was writing feels cheap. Senseless, pointless, tawdry drivel spat onto a page with no clear direction, no point, and not really worth all that much. I tried to write something deep and personal and found myself circling so much that after going a long way, I'd only managed to penetrate a layer or two, such being the nature of spirals. I tried to go with a direct approach and ran into a hard wall that sent me staggering backwards, banner torn and troops gone, after just the initial charge. I tried to write out something of my thoughts on home, and where did that go? I had a page down and felt like I was a paragraph away from being out of things to say. Maybe it's me; maybe I have trouble sharing anything. That's it, I'm just a selfish person. You can't have my memories, you aren't allowed to see my feelings or my thoughts. Stay away, they're mine.

But it's not like I'm the Giver. If I put my memories on a page, they're not going to disappear. I don't need to worry about it. For example, if I tell you about the Halloween when my mom, as usual, had us split up the spoils of the night so we could all get an equal amount and make sure we had treats that we liked, and to make sure we didn't eat it all at once so she could mete out candy to us on a slower basis—it worked, we managed to still have candy throughout the year as she did this—and then she split the piles that were left after we took all that would fit in our little candy tubs into chocolate, chewy candy, and hard candy, then the chocolate pile mysteriously disappeared...along with my dad, and we pursued him to his room where he'd locked himself in his closet until we finally managed to dig him out, scour the closet, and eventually found a box marked “Radioactive! Poison! Explosive! Keep out!” in words and symbols containing—you guessed it—all our chocolate, that memory is still mine. Sharing that memory hasn't cheapened it, much less dissolved it from my mind.

What do I share? I don't share much. Sarah noted the other day “You realize ninety percent of the things she says are jokes, right?” as I'd told someone very seriously, as is my custom, some nonsense thing about their food at dinner. It's true, I joke constantly. It's my way of getting along with people, of relating to them, of making, having, keeping friends. I feel rather proud of myself when someone believes my occasionally-well-constructed ridiculous stories. Like when I was on track and the girl next to me was speculating on where wind comes from. I knew it had something to do with pressure and if I'd thought much I could have brought it to mind, but I wasn't a weather student, I was in AP Biology. So I drew on that store of knowledge and told her it was created by the trees. They create energy from the sun but with so many receptors and creators there's an awful lot of ATP and it's hard to store energy—trees don't grow fat—so they send out chemical signals which trees use to communicate, which is completely true for alerting neighboring trees to the presence of diseases and warning them to build up resistance, so they all begin shaking their branches to release that extra energy. And that's where the wind comes from. She looked at me astonished. “Really?” “Yep.” “I thought it was low-pressure systems or something like that.” “No, it's all the trees.” “Oh. … Really?” “No, I'm lying.” Another start from her, and then we both cracked up. It's not about the fooling people, it's not about feeling smart or feeling some sense of superiority, I just like the jolt of going against convention even when I fully intend on following it. Ask me to pass the butter, say, and 4 of 5 times I'll probably look at you like you're stupid and say no even as I reach for the butter dish. Or pat, as the case may be. But it's not like that's sharing a part of me. I don't try to get people to like me by offering part of my soul, you could say, but by trying to make them laugh. I hate seeing people sad, I'd much rather see them smile and I like to make them smile.

But like I said, I don't offer my soul, and if I don't like seeing other people crying, I hate hate hate hate crying myself. Multiply that by factor (I feel a hole in the pit of my stomach seeing other people cry)/(I don't like seeing other people crying) if you want to get an accurate measure of how I feel on the subject.. I think that's how it goes mathematically to cancel out the lesser amount on the bottom. (And now my mathematician friend will say I'm letting my own inner mathematician show and I might not let him ever see this because I know there's a bit of mathematician in there hiding but I'm not about to admit that to him.) See, crying for me feels like not a healthy release of emotion that you need to let out, like people say it is. If it's in public, it calls others' attention to you whether in an “Oh, that's disgusting, keep it to yourself” way or a “You poor girl, come here and let me make it feel better” way. If I'm going to get sympathy or attention, it'd blasted well better not be regulated by my personal tear flow. It turns it into a call for attention and also a positive reinforcement for a negative action, in my opinion. Even worse is if someone responds with pity or condescension. Do not do that to me. It won't make me feel better; it won't make me feel anything but angry at you. My mother is the only one whose job it is to mother me, and she trusts my independence, so don't you even think about trying. It's degrading, it's demeaning, and I loathe it. And crying in public feels like I'm sending out this “Pity the child! She's just an ickle little wee thing who needs your mothering!” Crying in private is no good either. It makes me feel like a miserable ball of soggy wetness and it's not like anything is going to feel better after; if anything, it compounds the problem, whatever it may be, and adds the problem of a stuffy nose, burning eyes, and other physical discomforts that accompany crying. There is no “good cry.”

Of course, maybe all that is to cover my distaste for “offering my soul,” as I put it. Why don't I? I don't think it was a choice originally; I liked letting other people know how I felt when I was little. Of course, since that was generally happy unless upset by a skinned knee or a black eye from running into my brother going around a corner at top speed, that was decently easy. But as I got older and people grew more complex and everything got ridiculously complicated, even talking, I found that every time I tried to share my emotions, they got jumbled up, misunderstood, brushed aside, or just didn't come out, so I tried less. This is basically the reason you're reading this essay and not my attempt to figure myself out. This is all essentially just surface stuff. I will openly and freely say that I hate crying. I'll tell people I've built myself a shell and if they want to try to break it, good luck, they'd better have a wealth of diamond-tipped cutting tools at their disposal and not mind breaking several in the process. I've put lots of time and energy into it, and when I really put time and energy into something, it turns out well, I don't care what it is.

All of this whole mess, bundled up into a tangled, knotty, irregular lump of randomity with one of those “Hi, my name is...” stuck on, tattered and looking like it's spent the better part of a year in the bottom of a not-so-neat 5^th grader's backpack, with my name on it in bold but quick calligraphy, is what tries to unravel a little bit, just one piece of chenille stick from the mass, to turn into a personal essay and maybe that's why it's so hard. So it's easier to dab a bit of ink on the surface and roll it over the page, coming up with something simple but strange and twisted like this essay, giving you a surface imprint of who this “Elizabeth” is, something that you might not even recognize when you see the rest of it, like a simple amateur sketch that just looks like “Generic Individual” rather than “This One Specifically.” Because trying to dig out the thoughts on that one specific topic, that one particular thing that I wanted to express, leads into a mass, wanders off, gets lost, and leaves me either on a completely different thread or having hopelessly lost the original entirely, or just jabs me into a thumbtack that's been lying in wait to make me beat a hasty, completely undignified retreat. So it never gets to the paper, or if it does, I look at the paper, glance around hastily and suspiciously, then slowly suck that paper into the mass that is me, hiding it in the recesses where you'd have to dig around quite a bit to find it.

So I don't write personal essays; why don't I just write other essays, thoughts on life and so forth? Stuff like climbing mountains and praying. Why don't I stick with that? The problem with all of this is there's this sense of guilt or obligation roaming around me rather freely, and when this annoying posse peers out and sees personal essays by everyone else showing something deep and special to them, an exploration like I have found myself incapable of, it scatters and rushes to my brain and my fingers, all over, saying “Look at that! Why can't you do that? Come on, fingers, get a move on. Hash that soul out on paper. Look here, brain, you're in a personal essay class. What were you writing? Do you think that qualifies as personal? No good. Redo!” And once they start, it's hard to get them to stop, but the rest of me rebels so strongly at giving out that person of me that I end up never being able to produce anything that begins to be personal but only after much anguish and suffering. Okay, I exaggerate, but the end result is my essays just tend to peter out. Even like this one is doing...right about now.

(Incidentally, the "mathematician friend" I mentioned was Bryan, who read this before I remembered that was in there, and started teasing me about it immediately.)

What am I thankful for? Oh, *that's* a tough one.

In case you're wondering about timetable, the day in Oxford was November 22.  Which made the next day the 23rd, which I spent on projects and making Christmas postcards for family.  The next day, though, we had no classes, due to some random American holiday we decided we'd celebrate. Something about there being a lot of Americans in the center or something like that.

No, really, Thanksgiving was great.  I did kind of miss the fact that I didn't get to go to my family's houses because that is kind of the point of Thanksgiving.  Instead, I called home and talked to as many family members as I could.  There was an awful lot of baking and cooking going on downstairs in the kitchen, and before too long,  by which I mean 2:00, we had a magnificent Thanksgiving feast going on.  There were probably at least 5 turkeys, a tray or two of stuffing per table, potatoes, sweet potatoes, salad, rolls--everything you'd want for a Thanksgiving dinner but on a grand scale.  Or a 30-person scale.  I think we had at least a dozen pies after.  I kind of missed out on several of those, due to being really full for a good several hours.  That evening, we had a party  upstairs celebrating the fact that we were now officially in Christmas season.  We watched Nightmare Before Christmas, about half of The Hogfather, and Tangled.  All well-respected Christmas traditions, right?  (Hey, sitting around on the floor with your friends, everyone wrapped up in blankets--that's a good Christmas feeling.)

The day after that was also short, as we had an art show set up on the back stairs and in the art studio, complete with little hors d'oeuvres.  There are some extremely talented artists in this program.  I have to admit, my favorite was probably Madeline's cave--she had built it with foam around Christmas lights with little mirrors hanging inside of it, and it looked positively magical.  I told her, and still stand by the idea, that I could live in a place like that (preferably made of something firmer than foam).  Still, though, the other ones were amazing.  About halfway through the scheduled time, we went to the classroom and had some readings.  There were some fun essays, some really amusing or very serious stories, and my essay.  I wasn't planning on reading any, but John asked me to so I did.  I'll post it next.  Put some more work into my projects for art. It was a good few days.

For your viewing pleasure: Some external photos of the London Center.  I actually took them the day after this, but I thought I'd give you some pictures anyway.

Just Another College Town

We spent the day after Stratford in Oxford.  We'd stayed at hostels overnight; the one I was in was very comfortable.  The guy who ran it was very kind and enormously excited to make us a full English breakfast, because he was very proud of his cooking.  He got our table a pot of hot chocolate and lots and lots of toast while breakfasts were cooking.  Have I described these breakfasts before?  You've got toast, eggs, bacon (fried ham), sausage (this was the best I'd had in that it tasted the least like cardboard), and juice...and fried mushrooms, tomatoes, beans, and if you really wanted it, blood pudding.  I never had that last one.  But the rest of it was really quite good and very filling.

Anyway, we went on to Oxford from there and all unloaded at one end and walked up the streets to their museum.  Unlike Cambridge, we'd already let them know exactly what was happening and they didn't have a problem with us coming in en masse.  The museum was beautiful--I'll have to post some of my sketchbook from the trip sometime.  I spent a good several hours there sketching and so forth, and then we had wander time until Evensong.  I know a lot of people went on the "Harry Potter" tour to their assembly hall or something which was used as Hogwart's great hall.  You know, with the candles.  I didn't want to spend the money, though, and was more interested in seeing what an English college town looked like.  I ended up wandering around a lot on my own and discovered that, aside from the fact that the houses are a lot closer together, their shopping district is far larger than Provo, they have cobbled streets rather than paved, and the whole city gets into the decorating for Christmas spirit, it felt familiar.

We went on into the cathedral for Evensong.  We'd had seats reserved for us on one side that were reasonably comfortable--high-backed chairs with arms, padding on the seats, and a little stool.  It was directly across from where the choir was and the whole lot was mostly lit by candles.  The choir filed in later; they all wore the traditional choir robes and they were mostly young boys.  The two preachers were in darker robes, and they sat at one end of the aisle with us and the choir facing each other on either side.  The whole program was written out, with all the words the speakers said and instructions for those of us listening.  The music was beautiful, but it was a very different type of worship than I'm accustomed to.  I spent a lot of the time feeling slightly out-of-place and wondering what I was supposed to do, but the music was beautiful.

(Sorry, no pictures today.)

Home of the Bard

For reference for the rest of this entry:  http://www.shakespeare.org.uk/home.html

So I left off about at Anne Hathaway's house, right?  Well, after that, we went to the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford where a famous author is buried.  Bet you can't guess who that is.

And from the outside:

And our professor's daughter inside with the dress-up clothes being put on her.  She was kind of a favorite.  Can't guess why...so many girls and one small child...

Next, we walked down the road a little ways more and ended up in Stratford.  We went to the place where his house used to be when he was writing his plays.  He's so creative--he called it New Place.  It was a big house, beautiful gardens, practically a mansion by Stratford standards, and now looks approximately like a hole in the ground.  Why?  Because when he died, some other people inherited it, and because Shakespeare was famous, they got tourists.  And they didn't like tourists.  So they decided it would be a brilliant idea to destroy the house.  And cut down the tree given to Shakespeare by King James.  Because they're smart like that.  So they're digging out the area to see the foundations, might even be restoring it at some point, which would be cool.  They did have several displays there about the various plays and a bit on Shakespeare's life in the house next door.  I'd say if you're ever there, worth a visit.  The gardens are pretty incredible.  There were hedges everywhere, little almost-maze-like flower beds, and an arbor that had apples growing over it.  I still want some sort of arbor that I can walk through and pick fruit as it hangs over my head.  Brilliant gardening.

The house hole and gardens

Okay, very small portion thereof.

After that, we went along to find his birthplace.  Now that was interesting.  I believe it is the actual house.  You come up to it on one side down a street lined with shops--one of them is only kind of a knock-off of the Leaky Cauldron, called Magic Alley which was definitely not referencing Diagon Alley nor was the sign out front a rip-off of anything Potter-esque.  And across the street was a restaurant called the Food of Love.  Can't guess where that name possibly came from.

Anyway...so we found the birthplace in a large visitor's center.  Big.  Can't miss it.  Walked in, told them our group, and we were ushered into an intro thing.  And by ushered in, I mean she pointed, a door opened, and we were on our own on a guided tour through an automated path with videos of "So, this dude called Shakespeare...heard of him?"  When one video ended, a door would open on the opposite side and we'd walk into another room where another video awaited us.  Finally we walked down a hall of fame banner walk of all the famous people who had ever been in a Shakespeare play (including David Tennant because who doesn't like him? Especially in the UK?) and finally we went to the house.

The house was very nice.  It looked like this from the side we came out on:

You'll notice it's getting towards evening.  (Although technically this was after we came out.) Long and busy day and it wasn't over yet.  The tour started in the front room where they had an enormous bed to show off how awesome they were that they could afford such expensive furniture...but of course they didn't sleep on it; far too expensive.  We also saw his father's glove-making shop (there were some cool soft rabbit skin gloves with a slit for riding or doing a Vulcan salute).  As it happens, his father did rather well for himself as he was a glove maker, the mayor, and either black market salesman or smuggler.  One way or another, illicit dealings on the side.

We went through the rest of the house and I had a long talk with one guide in the children's bedroom (toys everywhere) about tourism and writing and books and literature.  Very important things.  I wish I could remember more detail of the conversation, but that's what I get for waiting 7 months to write about it.

We were coming to the close of the day and a few of us wandered around the town for a while looking at the shops before going to a good ol' English pub for dinner--heavy wooden tables, sign out front, and everything.  We got our food and the guy asked what we wanted to drink--"Water, please."  And he gave us this look that I was rather getting used to of "...you're in a pub and you want what?"

We then went to the Shakespeare statue.  I'd give you pictures but my camera doesn't work well in the dark.  He was surrounded by Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, and so on.  This was for a short time.  We trotted on down the road to the Swan Theatre to watch Measure for Measure by the RSC.  The duke was a very good actor, as was Isabella, and they did have fun putting on their play but...well... Certain parts of it were rather disturbing and our professor was kind of upset that he'd brought his teenage boys to see it.  Little too much black leather and such.  I also found a shirt I like....

A wizard is never late. But then, I'm no wizard.

What are you talking about?  I've definitely been here the whole time, keeping you updated.  And said updates have definitely been in a timely fashion.  I don't know what you're thinking, but stop laughing at me.

Anyway, so...after that last time, what did I get up to?  Ah, there were fun things, I assure you.  For example, the day after, we were invited downstairs to the Magalhaes' for a ward activity for the Portugese ward.  Then again, it ended up being a singles ward activity, as the only people there were young singles.  Which was odd, because I had been getting used to being in a family ward.  But not so weird, I guess, since I was in a large group of single ladies.  And Chris.  Anyway, the party was fun--they had delicious food (Really great beans and rice, awesome desserts, and I think there were chips or something.  Hey, it was a while ago, give me a break!) (I mean...I'm on top of this...yeah...)  So we ate, we danced (some), and generally enjoyed ourselves.

The next day was Saturday; I went in the morning to a book signing.  I kind of found it amusing that I was going to a book signing for a professor from BYU (Brandon Sanderson), but I wanted to read his new book.  I was 1/3 of the way through by the time I got there, too...Hey, when I start reading his books, I find myself rather...sucked in.  They're hard to put down.  Speaking of which, you should all read his books.

The next day, I was giving a talk in Sacrament Meeting, as was one of the other girls in our ward group.  I'd based mine on President Uchtdorf's talk from the October General Conference.  That morning, the printer was fussy, the tube threw us off because part of the route had closed, I almost fell on my face on the way out of the tube station, the bus was late and didn't come until sacrament meeting was half over and we finally got to church with 15 minutes left of the meeting and the bishopric was almost visibly sweating.  The other speaker must have been going for 30 minutes by that time, but we both got 5 minutes for our talks and I tried to make sure I kept it short so we finished on time.  It was a good experience, though, even with all of the trouble.

The next day...oh, the next day!  Hopped on a bus in the morning and drove over to a wonderful little town on the river Avon where they apparently forded Strats, whatever those may be..  It was a cool day and we got off at Anne Hathaway's house.  It was actually a rather large house for the time, as her father was quite well-off.  I especially liked the clockwork spit-turning mechanism.

Only Remembered

This was a happy happy day. After class, I finally made the successful trip to Cass Art to get that box of artist's supplies. And used some coupons and got a piece of paper for my final project. This meant walking home with a bag chock-full of stuff slung over a shoulder. The box had a scarlet inkwell, two oil paints, two acrylics, masking fluid (which I am informed is for making white space in watercolor paintings and it rubs off unlike crayon), a watercolor tube, and some sticks that are like charcoal/chalk/crayon hybrids. I am inexpert with those. But if I figure out how to use them, they should be fun. So with this chock-full bag (I was also carrying my backpack) I found my way to the Handweaver's Studio before heading home because I'd wanted to for a while. I found a hand spindle that is much better than my cd-pencil-and-clay handmade one (because it is balanced) and got some wool of various types for not too much because they weren't huge hunks of wool and besides that they gave me the student price on the spindle because that's what I'd been told it was when it turned out not to be. But I like it. It's served me well, and I'm actually almost out of wool already, and that wasn't even a month ago. Yeah, I liked it. It's actually kind of addictive, and after a bit you can spin while doing almost anything else. You know, if you need your hands, then you run into a problem, but otherwise...it's great!

Then the best part of the day. I was sitting there spinning while some people were headed to War Horse feeling kind of disappointed because that was the one play I wanted to see here (the rest were Broadway plays, really; better to watch them in the States) (and okay, I would have been majorly upset if we hadn't seen some Shakespeare plays, but I got 3 of those in!) (I'd actually wanted to see it since before I even knew I was going on the program after watching a video about the puppet they made for it) when Karen came up to me and said “Hey, you coming?” Huh? “Don't you remember you paid for this in September?” I probably didn't shut up the rest of the way there from excitement. (Remember how the NH museum said I have a bad memory? Yeah, it just confirmed something I already knew.) And let me tell you, so very worth every pound.

The play started with a gentleman coming in and just standing while some birds flew; he started singing later as another military man walked in and sat sketching a bit. Then came a young foal puppet—he had two people for the front legs, two for the back, and one for the head. They were basically part of the puppet; I guess you could say they were the horse. The foal had stiff, unjointed legs which worked well for getting the jerky-legged young foal movement. He was alone on stage for a while, then rounded up and sold at auction after two brothers had a betting battle over him—the brother who won was just drunk and stubborn and held a grudge against the other brother (who, it was later revealed, thought less of the first brother because he hadn't gone to war while conveniently forgetting that someone had to stay and run the family farm, which the brother who liked drinking left later but before the play started to get his own farm) when he'd been at the fair to buy a cow. And it was doubly hard for everyone to understand when the foal was a hunter/workhorse mix who, because of his hunter blood, wouldn't be much good for farming purposes. His wife was furious but decided that the only way to make a profit was to raise him and then sell him, and turned his care over to her son. Which is a bad idea with an animal you want to sell, because of course the boy developed an attachment. He named the foal Joey and taught him to come at a whistle, a few other tricks, and rear when he said (I think) “Way up!” And he reared at the back of the stage and suddenly the full grown horse was standing there, moving out from the shadows of backstage as the young foal puppet dissolved. (Someone said it basically split in half, but I missed it, being focused on this new huge animal.) The grown Joey was impressive. He's basically a wicker construction, but the working of the horse is almost all interior—two inside working legs and breath and tail, and the one on the head. I think the one standing outside working the head also worked the ears, which moved individually. With all of this, he moved almost just like a real horse, and sometimes watching the play I could believe that he was alive. Not real, perhaps; he had too little hair to be real, but definitely alive.

The boy—Albert, I think—was of course fond of his horse. He raced him across fields and jumped fences with him, which caught the attention of the military gent from the beginning who began sketching the pair, and of Albert's father's brother and son, who became rather covetous. So they got Albert's father drunk and bet him that he couldn't get Joey to plow in a week, 32 guineas (the price originally paid for Joey which was the most that year by far) against Joey himself. Albert's father stumbled home drunk and tried to put a collar on Joey who reacted...strongly...and Albert and his mother rushed out to see the commotion, whereupon Albert was told to teach Joey to plow or he'd lose his horse, so he said he'd teach him and if they won the bet, his father had to promise to never sell Joey. He did teach him, too, because Joey trusted him—it only took a day or so each to get him used to the collar and being directed by the long leads, but the week passed and the bet time came without his actually having been able to move the plow. Of course, it being a play, the plow was pulled the required distance among much cheering and disbelief and Joey astonished them all. (The plow had fabric on the front that it pulled to make a furrow.) At this point, the bells rang and WWI was begun. The next scene saw Albert's cousin joining the war, given a knife for luck which had seen his father and his grandfather through their wars, and Albert's father hearing that 100 (pounds? Guineas? Whichever is more, I think) being offered for a good officer's horse. And shortly thereafter, Joey was on stage and already switched hands before Albert ever showed up to protest. When he couldn't get his horse back, he tried to enlist but was only 15. The officer—the same one who'd been sketching—promised that he'd take good care of Joey and bring him back; after all, this war would only last perhaps a week. He also promised to show him the sketches he'd made.

Joey entered the war service and was introduced to Topthorn, the other full horse-puppet on stage (He was black, Joey was a bright chestnut) and had a quick fight with him to establish pecking order. The first charge began—Joey and Topthorne with riders, the other cavalry being represented by horse puppets that were just heads and backs resting on one person with officers who were heads and torsos mounted on them and held by another on the side charging into a flash of cannon fire—and Joey's officer was shot from his back by either a piece of shrapnel or a bomb, a huge piece of wicked-looking metal coming from across the stage through flashing light and the captain fell backwards, lifted and carried backwards and laid down by stagehands. Around them, the others also fell one by one, leaving the stage littered with bodies as the stagehands laid down to join the dead. The halves of horses and humans that had almost been comical before suddenly became grotesque reminders of the shattered bodies of war. And among all this came Christmas at Albert's home, where he received a bicycle from his parents (which he was unenthusiastic about, seeing it as an inadequate replacement for Joey, which disappointed his mother and caused his father's temper to boil over) and a package from the front which he received eagerly, and then read the news of the officer's death which came with the sketchbook with Joey's picture. He was devastated by the news and his mother went to get something to cheer him up, only re-arriving after he'd taken the sketch of Joey and ridden off on his bicycle.

The next scene was of Albert's cousin being told to ride Joey (He belonged to your family, right? *moment of tension for the cousin*) and they rode into war, met with machine gun fire, the stage went black, and cut for intermission. Cruel, cruel people who leave me hanging at a scene like that.

When intermission was over, Albert had joined the war and been shuffled from the unit he was trying to join to the infantry, where he told the (colonel?) in charge (whose every sentence was interspersed liberally with “effin'”) that he was looking for his horse, showed him the sketch, and was mocked for it (“Do I look like a horseman? Do I look like an equine enthusiast?” with his favorite word thrown in) and they were told to grab a shovel. They laughed. And were sent packing for the shovels with all due speed.

Meanwhile, Joey and Topthorn, with riders, had been captured by the Germans, the leader of whom was very distraught at the need to go to the battleground and put the poor horses, caught by and hanging from the barbed wire, out of their misery and angry with the English for making the horses ride into this. His second in command was, well, he was one of the people who enjoyed war. He was bloodthirsty, suspicious, overeager to attack, and in the end killed Albert's cousin who was just trying to keep the knife his father had given him. With the boy's own knife. The officer who had ridden Topthorn was taken prisoner, and then they were going to take the horses back to the front (which the first German officer was upset about) when the ambulance showed up, pulled by the two other full horse puppets. If you can call them horses. The skeleton of these puppets showed through starkly, accentuated by more wood to make a spine jutting out from their backs, and instead of a firm mesh coating their sides, they had ghastly white tattered fabric around their stomachs, obviously dead on their feet. The ambulance was obviously in desperate need of the two fresh horses to pull it. The officer (who had taken an instant liking to Topthorn) tried to put a collar on him to save him from the front but Topthorn was skittish and wouldn't accept it (which the officer both admired and was sorry for—the Germans must be crazy to want such horses to be reduced to wearing a collar), when Joey approached cautiously. “You've done this before? It must be the English who are crazy!” On seeing his example, Topthorn allowed himself to be collared and the ambulance was pulled away.

Albert's company was in the war zone and he and a friend got separated.  Albert heard a horse and almost went to it when his friend, Davy, I think, pulled him back and Albert told him about his horse, even showed him the sketch.  Davy laughed at him for going all this way for a horse, and told him about his girl back home.  Albert asked to see a picture, looked at it, and said "Well, at least Joey is supposed to look like a horse!"

When the officer and two horses got to the hospital, the officers were dead and the hospital a wreck, so the officer decided to take one of their uniforms and pretend he was a hospital orderly and stay there with the horses.  Which really worked rather well for a while; the horses got to sit and do little, the officer made friends with a little girl who liked the horses and her mother which was difficult at first since they were French and the lady didn't trust him at all.  But then the other officer, the one who had stabbed Albert's cousin, came along with a huge gun carriage and the skeletal horses, one of which died there, and he commandeered the two horses again, taking the officer with him.  The last skeletal horse died on the way and Topthorn wasn't doing well, either.

Meanwhile, Albert's company was following a gun carriage and ran across a dead horse by the side of the road.  Albert noticed it was still slightly alive and had to kill it, in front of a little French girl who was looking for her horse and she cried, and Albert gave up, deciding that Joey was already dead.  At this point, they were attacked by gas and Albert didn't put his mask on, and Davy pulled him out and to the hospital.

Topthorn died, there was a face-off between several of the Germans who were arguing about the war--Topthorn's German officer, who had wanted to take him home after the war, was angry with the fanatic officer because he'd worked the beautiful horses too hard, he ended up shot, and then a bomb came and killed most of them, but Joey was cut free and he ran off in a panic and got tangled in some barbed wire in No-Man's-Land.  The German and English trenches on either side were surprised to see a horse, white-flagged each other and got out to rescue him.  The English side won the horse in a coin toss and took him to the hospital.  The officer in the trench was Albert's first officer, actually.

The trench officer took Joey to the hospital and was asking if they could save him, because the men had decided he was a miracle horse.  Meanwhile, Albert was just across the stage.  He had been blinded by the gas but wasn't responding to anything, encouragement or otherwise because he was depressed.  The doctor looking at Joey decided he was infected and couldn't be helped, mostly because there would be no one to watch him during recovery which he needed, and pulled out a gun to shoot him.  His gun was empty, so they started reloading it and then an officer got upset at the delay and pulled out his gun.  Albert was talking about Joey and whistled the whistle that called him.  Joey perked up and started moving as he could, Albert heard the horse and his response and went wild, and the trench officer, connecting it at last, pushed the gun away from Joey the instant it went off.

You can imagine the reunion that followed, and the play ended with Albert's mother and father at their farm, his mother looking back wondering at the man who had turned into their lane, and both of them dropped their loads in surprise to see Albert and Joey riding up the road to their home.