On the road with a long-distance morris dancer

13 August 2008

When A.S.H. Smyth was asked to accompany a friend on a 150-mile morris dance from London to Norwich, he could hardly say no. But morris dancing is a perilous pursuit

SATURDAY. Wretham to Hingham. Tim’s little cadential flourishes have regained something of their former zest. Caught in a cartoon downpour, our deranged hero nonchalantly dons a poncho (and swimming goggles) and quickens his pace.

Come the evening, he is booked to do his Flanders & Swann show at a wedding — in Bedfordshire. So ravaged is his lower body that a guest congratulates him on a brilliant physical impersonation of Michael Flanders.

SUNDAY. Hingham to Norwich. ‘Once more unto my breeches, dear friend!’ Tim is on the road at 7:10. ‘Always expect something to go wrong on the last day,’ he yells stalwartly, as he lurches away round the bend.

Sure enough, four miles outside Norwich, the Citroën breaks down. The flesh is strong but the French engineering is weak. After nine days on the road the driver, cameraman, research assistant and physio may be about to miss the triumphal entrance into Norwich.

The RAC’s finest get me into town just ahead of Tim’s welcoming party (comprising two Bury Fair ladies and the Squire of Kemp’s Men, playing ‘Kemp’s Jig’). I am just settling in to a sorely needed (free) beer at The Wig & Pen when the Lord Mayor’s official bodyguards, the Whifflers, arrive, clearing the way with their wooden swords and promptly whiffling Tim across the road to the Bishop’s Garden to be met by His Worship (who adroitly requisitions Tim’s fancy doublet to be displayed in Norwich Museum, beside — or, perhaps, above — the pantaloons of one William Kemp).

In honour of Tim’s successful compression of five weeks’ morrising into one, I promptly attempt the same trick with the rest of Kemp’s revels, whereupon there ensues much boozing, cigars aplenty, and a full and frank exchange of views with a member of the Catholic clergy (for which transgression I am duly smote with a rotten hangover the following morning).

I fall asleep in the doorway of a priest-hole, and awake, somehow, in an army camp bed. The first-floor view of the Waveney is admittedly delightful; but nothing — not even in the last nine days — could have prepared me for the taxidermised cat.

In The Bath is published by Preface. Donations to DebRA and Comic Relief can be made at www.fitzhigham.com.