Day 28: The Winter Play

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players," Shakespeare wrote, and then he listed the seven ages of a life, from the baby in its nurse's arms to the old man at the end.

Today eleven children took their first steps across a very small stage, and I counted at least three ages among them.

Dear Grandmother,

I found your play. It was at the back of the bottom shelf of the classroom cupboard, under a box of broken chalk and a map that still shows the old roads. Twelve pages, stitched with brown thread down the fold, in your handwriting. On the front you wrote "The Lamp in the Window, a play for winter," and under that, smaller, the names of your pupils and their parts. One of them was Marta, the girl from the far farm. She played the moon.

It is a simple story, and a good one. A ferryman's daughter waits at home on a snowy night while her father crosses the lake. The wind tries to blow out her lamp, the snow tries to cover the window, the cold creeps under the door, and she keeps the lamp burning through it all, until the boat comes home. The wind, the snow and the cold are all parts for children. So is the moon, who watches and says almost nothing. The daughter has the best line, near the end: "Keep the lamp lit, and the boat will find the shore."

I read it aloud to the class this morning, and when I reached the last page Sofia said, "We have to do it." Nobody argued. Not even Kostya, who argues with everything on principle.

So we have begun. Sofia is the daughter. Leon is the ferryman, and has already asked whether he can have a real oar. Pip and Yuri are the wind, which suits them. Ida and Bea are the snow, Noor is the cold, and Sami is the moon, because he said he wanted a part where he could stand still and think. The others are the waves, which means lying on the floor and rolling, and they are very happy about it.

Learning lines was hard at first. Then I tried something I remember from my own school, and it worked better than I hoped. Each child walks while saying the line, one step for each part of the sentence, and always on the same path across the room. "Keep the lamp lit," three steps to the window. "And the boat," two steps more. "Will find the shore," and stop. After a few times, the feet remember even when the mouth forgets. Sofia had her whole speech by lunchtime. Anyone learning anything by heart can try it, a poem, a recipe, a telephone number. Walk it in the kitchen, from the stove to the table, and it stays.

I read tonight that in Shakespeare's own time, actors were never given the whole play. Paper was dear and copying was slow, so each actor got only his own lines, written out on a long strip of paper and rolled up, with the last few words of the line before as a cue. He learned his part from the roll, often without knowing the full story until the first rehearsal. That is where our word "role" comes from: the roll of paper in the actor's hand. I told the children, and Leon said that he would rather have the whole story, thank you, and an oar.

Dora has promised to make the snow costumes from old sheets. Greta says she can find blue paper for the waves. Tomas has offered to build the window, a real wooden frame with a sill wide enough for the lamp, and I said yes before he finished the sentence.

In the margin of your last page there is one more note, in pencil, very faint. It says "E. will bring the lantern from the ferry." I read it three times. I have not asked Emil about it. I think I will leave that note where it is, between your pages and my letter, a little longer.

Shakespeare said that all the world is a stage. If so, then the classroom is the smallest one in it, with the stove in the wings and the coat pegs for a curtain. But on it, today, a girl of nine stood by a pretend window and told a boy with no oar that the boat would find the shore. And for a moment I saw you there, Grandmother, twenty-two years old, with a lantern in someone else's hands, playing a part you had written for yourself.

Your Vera

Day 29: A Line Remembered

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever," John Keats wrote at the start of a long poem; "its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness."

He was a young man when he wrote it, Grandmother, about the age you were in the lake town.

Dear Grandmother,

I came on the Saturday bus this week, because my mother comes on Sundays and we agreed it is better to share you out. The city was grey and wet, and the care home smelled of floor polish and oranges. Hanne was at the desk. She said you had slept well and eaten your porridge, and that you had been singing in the corridor in the morning, quite loudly, and that two of the other ladies had joined in.

You were in your chair by the window in Room Twelve, with the blanket I knitted badly last winter over your knees. You looked at me with that polite, careful face you have now for visitors. I said it was Vera. You said, "How nice," the way you say it to everyone, and patted the bed for me to sit.

I had not planned to bring the play. My mother said no letters, and I keep to that. But the play is not a letter, and I had copied out one page by hand on the bus, the last page, in big round writing. I did not give it to you. I only held it, and I told you that the children in the lake town are doing a winter play about a ferryman's daughter and a lamp.

You did not answer for a while. You looked at the rain on the window. Then you said, quite clearly, in a voice that was younger than the rest of you, "Keep the lamp lit, and the boat will find the shore."

I did not say anything. I could not. You said it again, more softly, and then you smiled at me as if we had both done something clever. Then you asked whether it was time for lunch.

Hanne came in a little later with the tea trolley, and I told her. She was not surprised. She reminded me of what she had said in the autumn about tunes, and said that lines learned by heart are often kept the same way, especially lines said out loud many times, with a rhythm to them. She said it is good to bring those things, and to say them together, and not to test.

So before I left I tried something she suggested. I wrote your line on a card in large letters, "Keep the lamp lit, and the boat will find the shore," and under it, "She also knows the slow waltz. Hum it." Hanne pinned the card on the little board by your door, under the day of the week, so that every nurse and every visitor can see it. Anyone caring for someone whose memory is going could make a card like that: the few songs, sayings and lines the person still knows, written where people can find them. Then nobody has to arrive with empty hands and only questions.

On the bus home I thought about why words with a beat last so long. Before people could write, whole histories and laws were kept in verse and song, because the rhythm holds the words in place, the way a mould holds jelly. If you forget one word, the beat tells you how long the gap is, and often the word comes back to fill it. Children learn their letters in a song for the same reason. You knew that. You wrote a play for children with lines they could walk to.

I rang my mother from the bus stop and told her. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "She used to say that to me when Dad was late home from work. I never knew where it came from." I said now she knows. She said thank you, Vera, and I think she meant it, though neither of us said anything else.

Keats wrote that a thing of beauty never passes into nothingness. I used to think that was something poets said to make us feel better. Today I watched you reach into fifty-eight years of fog and bring back one line, whole, in your own voice. Keats was right. Some things do not pass away. They wait, like a lamp in a window, for someone to come close enough to see them.

Your Vera