Carols at Christmas: " All broad and bright rises th' Eternal Morning Star"

King's College Chapel Window, Cambridge

Music by Charles Gounod, lyrics by Henry F.. Chorley

"Though poor be the chamber
Come here, come and adore:
Lo the Lord of Heaven
Hath to mortals given,
Life for evermore…life for evermore…life for evermore.

Wind to the cedars proclaim the joyful story:
Wave of the sea, the tidings bear afar;
The Night is gone! behold in all its glory,
All broad and bright rises th' Eternal Morning Star."

I first came across this Victorian carol in an old children's novel , The Gentle Shadows by Kathleen Wallace.  Published in 1947, it tells how Vicky, a lonely eleven year old, is befriended by an ebullient unconventional family, just returned from overseas, moving into an old Dutch-style house* in time for the first postwar Christmas of 1945.

Dutch-gabled houses, Topsham, Devon

 She joins the Marshalls hunting for furniture in sale-rooms and junk shops, and making home-made decorations and presents, when shop goods are still scarce and everything was rationed.

"Bunches of holly hung in the greengrocers' doors, Christmas-trees leaned against the windows from the pavements outside, and there was a brave attempt with cotton-wool and some tinsel and red paper, to make the shop windows look decorated.  There were no turkeys dangling from hooks at the butchers' shops and only very makeshift toys in the shops where you might expect to find them;…"  but there were still carol singers and plenty of music.

Carol Singers, collage, Shadwell Local History Society 

When the family join the carol singers, they include another Victorian composition, "Like Silver Lamps in a distant shrine, The Stars are sparkling bright",  as well as regular favourites such as "I saw Three Ships come Sailing by , The Holly and the Ivy, and The Twelve Days of Christmas.  The story concludes through Christmas Day  and homecoming celebrations for their soldier son returned from Burma, with his wife and new baby, all shared with friends and neighbours, and some "gentle shadows" from the past.

"Like silver lamps"

Kathleen Wallace (1890-1958) is little remembered now, but was a popular poet and novelist in the 1930s and '40s.  Daughter of  William Montgomery Coates*, Bursar of Queens' College, she grew up in Cambridge and graduated from Girton in 1914. Her twin sister died as a baby, and her brother was killed in action in 1915; she  expressed her grief in her war poems, Lost City Verses, published in 1918.  She married Major James H. Wallace of the Canadian Mounted Rifles in 1917 and brought up their four sons. The family lived in China for seven years, and she only began writing novels after they returned in 1927, setting her first novel  in China.

Through the '30s and '40s she wrote many novels and children's stories, including  fictional  studies of Mary Kingsley and the Brontes: (in The Prize Essay, two schoolgirls find themselves visiting the Haworth household, just as the "gentle shadows" are welcomed by the Marshall family). Although out of fashion now, elements of her writing have been praised as 'masterly', and her poems are included in Cambridge Poets of the Great War, Michael Copp's anthology, of 2001.

 "The shadows that people this house are very gentle ones."  Charlotte Yonge, 1860

*(see millroadcemetery.org.uk/coates-aileen-montgomery)

May beginnings: "I'm to be Queen of the May,…*

"Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity.  Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art-form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind's eye.  All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.

The Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens (photo R. Harding)

"There was absolutely no point in feeling depressed about the scene, it would have been like feeling depressed about the Grand Canyon or some event of the earth outside everybody's scope.  People continued to exchange assurances of depressed feelings about the weather or the news, or the Albert Memorial which had not been hit, not even shaken, by any bomb from first to last.
The May of Teck Club stood obliquely opposite the site of the Memorial, in a row of tall houses which had endured, but barely; …. the Club had been three times window-shattered since 1940, but never directly hit.   There the windows of the upper bedrooms overlooked the dip and rise of treetops in Kensington Gardens across the street, with the Albert Memorial to be seen by means of a slight craning and twist of the neck.

Queen Alexandra House, Kensington, built in 1884 (photo Historic England) 

"….All the nice people were poor and few were nicer, as nice people come, than these girls at Kensington…  The first of the Rules of Constitution, drawn up at some remote and innocent Edwardian date, still applied more or less to them:

 The May of Teck Club exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London.

 As they realised themselves in varying degrees, few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means."

The Girls of Slender Means   Muriel Spark, 1963

Muriel Spark drew on her time at a similar ladies' hostel in 1944 (the Helena Club on the north side of the park) for the May of Teck Club*.  The story unfolds in flashbacks to 1945, from VE Day in May to  VJ Day in August.  Amid wartime rationing and victory celebrations, the girls pursue their individual dreams of careers and marriage:   among them Joanna, the elocution teacher reciting The Wreck of the Deutschland,  Jane, the embryo gossip columnist, Dorothy with her debutante chatter, mad Pauline, and the ever elegant and heartless Selina.
They barter ration coupons, exchange suitors and borrow clothes; a much-prized pre-war Schiaparelli evening dress is a key element in the novel's shattering climax.  Fascinated by their lives is Jane's friend, the anarchist poet Nicholas Farringdon;  "I think he was in love with us all, poor fellow".

Elsa Schiaparelli evening dress, 1938

"They call me cruel hearted, but I care not what they say,

For I'm to be Queen of the May, mother, I'm to be Queen of the May."   Alfred, Lord Tennyson

*The Helena Club was set up by Princess Helena, daughter of Queen Victoria, Queen Alexandra House was established as a ladies' hostel by the wife of Edward VII, and Princess May of Teck involved in many charities, became Queen Mary, consort of George V.