Waltz With Me E-Book

Diane Samuels

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 136

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

When Maggie Byrne attends the retirement dinner of her old music teacher at the convent school she attended, she discovers she has more in common with the founding nun, Cornelia Connelly, than she previously realised. As events in Maggie's world progress and relationships break down, Cornelia's remarkable life waltzes and weaves through Maggie's, bringing them together through their shared love for music. Inspired by true stories of the nineteenth-century educational pioneer and reverend mother Cornelia Connelly and an ex-student of one of the schools she founded, Waltz With Me paints a moving picture of the challenges of marriage and motherhood, the calling of vocation, the nature of personal sacrifice for a greater cause and the impact of faith, infusing live waltz, sacred and folk music through the unfolding drama.

Leseprobe

waltz with me

diane samuels

renard press

Renard Press Ltd

124 City Road

London EC1V 2NX

United Kingdom

[email protected]

020 8050 2928

www.renardpress.com

Waltz With Me first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2023

Text © Diane Samuels, 2023

Foreword © Ghislaine Kenyon, 2023

Quote by Sister Anne Murphy on p. 158 used with permission from the Society of the Holy Child Jesus

Inside images © the Society of the Holy Child Jesus European Province Archives

Cover image © Smallfish Designs

Design by Will Dady

Diane Samuels asserts her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, or is used fictitiously.

Renard Press is proud to be a climate positive publisher, removing more carbon from the air than we emit and planting a small forest. For more information see renardpress.com/eco.

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, used to train artificial intelligence systems or models, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the publisher.

EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe – Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, [email protected].

contents

Foreword

Characters

Music

act i

Best Self

1 First Steps

2 New Horizons

3 White Cottage

4 Faith

5 Confess

6 Voyage

7 Eternal City

8 Little Lamb

9 Sugar Syrup

act ii

10 Flowers

11 Sacrifice

12 Mater Admirabilis

13 Vocation

14 New Order

15 Six Hours

16 Conjugal Rights

17 Bell Tolls

18 St Leonards

19 Waltz

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

foreword

Nuns of the order known as the Society of the Holy Child Jesus (SHCJ) were my teachers throughout my schooldays: I was a day girl at Cavendish Square School in London and then a boarder at St Leonards-Mayfield in rural Sussex. And so perhaps it was not so surprising that when I finally left this convent education behind for the freeing new world of Oxford University I buried it. Not as a conscious act, but it must have seemed to me a given that the person at the centre of this next bit of life would share little with the one from the confined and confining universe of Mayfield. I graduated, decided I wanted to become a primary-school teacher (much to the disgust of one of my French tutors, who judged this choice to be a waste of an Oxford education) and later went on to work in the Education Department of the National Gallery at a time of solid public funding, when we were able to make inventive and inclusive provision for our visitors. Along the way I also wrote, lectured, did – and still do – leadership training for the NHS and looked forward in the way that mid-career people do. I was probably being the ‘best self’ that Cornelia Connelly, nineteenth-century American-born founder of the schools and order, wrote about a century before the phrase became current again. It was only decades later that a chance connection with a Holy Child sister led to an offer to write a script for a short film about the life of Cornelia and I found myself revisiting and reflecting on my own education.

As I read Cornelia’s name in the email from one of the sisters, a single unwelcome image came into my mind: that of a woman cradling a terribly burned toddler in her arms. And then the rest of the story, or as much as I knew of it: Cornelia, a wife and mother of several children, before her life changed absolutely and she became a nun. By now a mother of four grown-up children myself, I began to wonder differently about her story, and accepted the job.

My research into Cornelia’s life and work led me along many paths, but the one that to my surprise affected me most was not in the end the painful story of Cornelia’s marriage to the ambitious and unpredictable pastor Pierce Connelly and her significantly tragic experiences of motherhood. Rather it was reading about the liberal, arts-rich education system that Cornelia developed after, for reasons apparently outside her control, she found herself obliged to become a nun, and then going on herself to found a teaching order in England. I realised that I was reading about the principles behind my school education, which, I now saw, had been exceptional. The Holy Child nuns who taught me, and their predecessors, were far from the grim tormentors of the Magdalenelaundries. Those who taught me were independent, many of them highly educated women, who offered a humane, broad and creative curriculum: the school week was punctuated with jewelled moments of self-expression. At Cavendish Square it was music, eurythmics (movement to music), drama and the multi-sensory side of Catholicism as expressed in the statues of saints in every classroom who, to the eyes of a six-year-old, at least, were dressed in gorgeous fabrics, as well as candle-lit, hymn singing processions on high feast days. At Mayfield it was the drama of the Live Crib when we wound through the village streets performing the Christmas story, with Mary on a donkey, a real baby in her arms, Joseph knocking on the door of the local pub to ask for a bed for the night. I was mysteriously moved by the great arch of the fourteenth-century chapel, took out every art book in the well-stocked library and taught myself to identify artists’ styles by covering up the captions. The art studio too was a haven where we drew from life and sometimes played guitar. To my surprise the nuns taught us to waltz, whirling us around the room to the sound of a crackly record.

It must have been this exposure to the world of the arts that so profoundly affected the way I approached my own career as an educator. At the primary school in Paddington where I first taught a year-three class consisting largely of refugee children with no English, I often used the arts as a way of reaching them, helping them to feel safe and confident in the way my own experience had done for me. These were the things I reflected on as I researched the Cornelia short-film script.

Shortly after delivering that script, another chance meeting, this time at a cinema, brought me back into contact with author and playwright Diane Samuels (we had previously been neighbours). This unexpected encounter was the catalyst for the development of the play that has emerged as Waltz with Me. At that first meeting, my head was still full of Cornelia, so I passed her story on to Diane, and when we met again for a coffee I also mentioned by chance (but perhaps not?) a contemporary woman known to me whose situation, Diane later sensed, somehow mirrored Cornelia’s. Diane asked me to join her in the research for the play and, thanks to the generosity of several supporters, we were able to follow Cornelia on some of her journeyings, from Philadelphia to Mayfield in Sussex, Derby and Alton Towers, Blackpool and Rome. We also got to know both Cornelia’s spiritual descendants, the current Holy Child sisters, who always warmly welcomed and helped us, and the family of Cornelia’s youngest son Frank, whose great-granddaughter Simonetta has the same gentle presence and fiery eyes as the ones we see in contemporary photographs of Cornelia.

Our period of research was punctuated with many more synchronistic, illuminating and delightful encounters of all kinds, so uncanny at times that we grew to put them down to Cornelia’s intervention from wherever she is (there is, after all, a current application to the Vatican to make Cornelia Connelly a saint).

In the end it seems that I had unwittingly sparked Diane’s talent for imaginative and empathetic invention, and in Waltz with Me she brings the stories of the two women together, giving them heightened life in an extraordinarily powerful way. Here Cornelia, previously in my mind little more than a victim of her circumstances, becomes the pragmatic, resolute and creative person that she must have been to achieve what she did – flawed, like the rest of us, but endlessly engaging.

With this publication we are hopeful that the women whose lives have inspired this story, separated by time but not circumstance, will find new life on the stage. Perhaps the play will also speak to many others who struggle to align personal lives and responsibilities with their heart’s calling to play a role in the wider world, bearing losses incurred on the way by developing deeper understanding and generosity of action. At my Holy Child schools, I witnessed how Cornelia’s curriculum demonstrated her belief in live performance as something that enhanced individual development and communal engagement, a notion that is definitely imbued in this script. I am grateful to Diane for many things, but especially for helping me re-evaluate my own education, a very rounding experience.

ghislaine kenyon

March 2023

characters

Maggie Byrne: Modern day: lapsed Catholic, mother, educator, musician/composer

Cornelia Peacock Connelly: Nineteenth century: originally American, wife, mother, then nun/Reverend Mother, educationalist, foundress of Society of the Holy Child Jesus order and schools (1809–79)

Pete: Modern day: Maggie’s husband

Pierce Connelly: Nineteenth century: Cornelia’s husband, originally American, Episcopalian (Protestant) vicar converting to Catholicism and then back to the Episcopalian Church

Mike: Modern day: Maggie’s lover/partner

John Henry: Nineteenth century: Cornelia’s toddler (second son)

Frank: Cornelia’s youngest (third) son

Bishop Wiseman: English Bishop

Mr Harting: Solicitor

Merty: Nineteenth century: Cornelia’s eldest son

Luke: Modern day: Maggie’s son

(Violinist)

Adeline (Ady): Nineteenth century: Cornelia’s daughter

Gwendaline: Cornelia’s English friend

Iris: Modern day: Maggie’s daughter

(Flautist)

Sister Theodora: Modern day: nun in her seventies

Sister Emily: Nineteenth century: young nun

(Pianist)

Instead of actor/musicians, a pianist, violinist and/or flautist of any age or gender may play separately from the acting company.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFO

Mercer (Merty): Cornelia and Pierce’s eldest son (died at 20)

Adeline: Cornelia and Pierce’s surviving daughter (died at 65)

John Henry: Cornelia and Pierce’s second son (died at 3)

Mary Magdalen: Cornelia and Pierce’s second daughter (died as a young baby)

Pierce Francis (Frank): Cornelia and Pierce’s youngest son (died at 90)

Gwendaline: Daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Catholic aristocrat, married to Prince Borghese in her early 20s

music

The following pieces have been selected to provide an example of the significant role music plays in the storytelling and drama.

For the reader, if you wish to be adventurous and add another dimension to your reading experience, you are invited to source the pieces that are publicly available and listen as you read. At the time of writing a streamable playlist has been created, containing the majority of the tunes below. You can find a link to this on the Waltz With Me page on the publisher’s website (renardpress.com/books/waltz-with-me).

For those mounting a production, please see this list as a guide to the musical landscape and feel free, if preferred, to make your own choices.

‘Musetta’s Waltz’ from La bohème by Puccini

‘Waltz in F Major’ by Verdi

‘Waltz in A-Flat Major’, Op. 69, No. 1 (‘Adieu’ waltz) by Chopin

‘Little Maggie’ by Old-Time bluegrass – travelling music

‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, traditional children’s song, , ‘Little Lamp’ variations

‘Cow and Dogs and Horses’, a playful, improvised nursery ditty – original composition

‘Veni Creator Spiritus’, plain chant, variations

‘Panis Angelicus’ by César Franck

‘Oh My God, Trim Thy Vine’, spiritual ‘work song’ – original composition

‘Bells’, original composition

‘The Derby Ram’, traditional folk song

‘Sonata in E Major’, Op. 1, No. 15 by Handel

For license to use original compositions of ‘Cows and Dogs and Horses’, ‘Oh My God, Trim Thy Vine’ and ‘Bells’ by David Osmond, please contact:

Mary Nelson at Nelson Browne Management ltd

48 Warwick Street, London W1B 5AW

Tel: [phone]

[email protected]

waltz with me

The play is held across time and space in a golden ballroom.

If a piano was playing when Mother Cornelia came into a room, she’d sweep up the nearest girl and waltz her off her feet.

‘Cornelia was very fond, I think, of life, love, singing, all of that.’

sister judith lancaster

‘The remembrance of my children never leaves me.’

mother cornelia connelly

ACT I

best self

Golden light. A piano. Light shifts to grey day. Image of a tomb with memorial stone:

cornelia augusta connelly 1809–1879foundress of the society of the holy child jesuslove knoweth no measure, feareth no labour, maketh sweet all that is bitter, findeth rest in god alone.

sister theodora is at the piano playing ‘Musetta’s Waltz’ from La bohème. maggie, in her late thirties, appears in a nervous rush, heading for the piano.

maggie: Shit.

theodora: Back to the old chapel piano, Maggie?

maggie: Oh God. Sorry, Sister Theodora.

theodora: Are you to play later?

maggie: Not sure… Not ready… Sorry, seem to be falling short of… what was it… ‘Be your good self…’?

theodora: ‘Be your best self…’

maggie: Right.

theodora: ‘The self God wants you to be.’

maggie: You know, I don’t think I can play. Best not.

(maggiemoves away from the piano.)

maggie: Don’t want to spoil your celebration.

theodora: Well, I’m most touched you’ve made it.

maggie: Of course, for your send-off.

theodora: How is it to be here again?

maggie: Weren’t the corridors longer… and colder? Everything seems… so… I dunno… familiar… yet different… like the new annexe out there… like those words that have appeared on the foundress’s tomb.

theodora: You mean ‘Love knoweth no measure…’? Cornelia’s words have been there as long as she has.

maggie: Not when I was here.

theodora: Certainly.

maggie: But in my last year at Live Crib I sat right there with the real baby that wouldn’t stop crying.

theodora: You played Joseph as a very attentive father.

maggie: Desperate as hell… the infant Jesus howling… me praying with all my might, ‘Please, please make it quiet’… to Mother Cornelia… I could have sworn… behind her blank tombstone.

theodora: To notice what’s always there we tend to need to be ready.

maggie: How ready?

theodora: Did the baby quieten?

maggie: I think so… at some point.

theodora: The crying stays more in the memory, perhaps.

maggie: Was it really half a lifetime ago?

theodora: Not of my life, to be sure.

maggie: Do you mind retiring?

theodora: It’s time.

maggie: You’ll be missed.

theodora: I’m glad to see so many of you again and provide the occasion for so much revisiting.

maggie: Actually, I wanted the chance to say… Well, when I teach…

theodora: That’s your work?

maggie: Only part time. But it makes me realise how skilfully, invisibly, powerfully you enabled us to somehow come into our own when we had the barest sense of what that might be…

theodora: It works both ways, you know.

maggie: Yes, yes, I learn incredibly from my students.

theodora: What do you teach?

maggie: Music… playing… composition a bit… But the subject is merely the medium. It’s really about whole person, isn’t it?

theodora: Such is the Holy Child approach.

maggie: ‘Words not actions.’

theodora: ‘Actions not words.’

maggie: Sorry for being so out of touch. But your influence does prevail, I promise.

theodora: I should retire more often – it’s rather gratifying.

maggie: I wish I could play a piece you deserve.

theodora: Oh, since you’ve come all this way, why not play after all? I mean, what would you say to a student of yours?

maggie: Well… I’d… I suppose… to… to just enjoy it…

theodora: How about a few turns to get you in the mood?

(theodorastarts playing Verdi’s ‘Waltz in F Major’.)

maggie: What, dance? Now? Beside the tomb?

theodora: Why not if it helps brighten the spirit?

maggie: I’ve not done a waltz since school…

theodora: Come, now, step in time for Mother Cornelia in thanks for quieting the crying baby. Ready?

maggie: Not at all.

theodora: Right foot back on One…

(Astheodoraplays,maggietentatively tries to waltz.)

maggie: Left foot to the side on Two…

theodora: That’s the way…

maggie: Oh… I guess that after a couple of glasses of wine… I guess I could brace myself… To hell with it… I’ll play.

theodora: Yes… the light fantastic toe.

(The tomb opens. A figure emerges, wearing a nineteenth-century nun’s habit.)

cornelia