You wouldn’t think that The Wicker Man would make a suitable subject for a school play but our headmaster E. C. Axford’s plays were dark dramas with a similar theme.
A People Apart was a tale of everyday village folk who practise pagan sacrifice while in Black Bread the inhabitants of a recently discovered remote island are forced to keep to their medieval lifestyles to please visiting tourists.
My sister Linda had a long speech, standing by the village cross, discussing the philosophical implications of holding back progress but the line that I remember was from one of the island’s disgruntled peasants, played by Clive Simms, who grumbles: “They threw my Morris Minor off the cliff!”
Mr Axford’s literary efforts also included a novel, A Stranger in Allanford, 1960, and a poem that was set to music by the school Madrigal Society.
As a retirement project he wrote about Bodmin Moor for a David & Charles topographical series.
At morning assembly Mr Axford would dip into his notebook of suitable readings. One of them, a tale of charitable deeds, ends with the hero arriving at a musical gathering, probably after giving away his cloak or his shoes. After explaining his late arrival he says to his friends: “And now, let us tune our instruments.”
A great closing line.