A PROCESSION


black and white, viewed from the high arcade of the triforium. Eleven times through the plasterboard cloisters and it still isn’t quite the way he conceived it. Time to go home. Early hours of the morning. In the close-packed Metro carriages, time to get warm. A man has something caught in the collar of his overcoat — a woman’s stocking — but no-body tells him.

The current only comes on in the evening: they have to shoot by night. Week after week, eight below zero, into the studio from the February streets, creating the atmosphere of a girls’ boarding school. A star from the stage plays the devious lead, not rescued from prison but a voluntary postulant (the convent a convenient place to lie low, out of sight of the police and of the occupying forces); her features asymmetrical, which gives her a liveliness within the oval wimple. The novice, in her white veil, just a giggling teenager up from the country, flirts with the singing coach. At breakneck speed he takes them through the harmonies; ‘You don’t need to voice the ‘S’ — somebody will do it,’ being by day a pâtissier-chocolatier and in the evenings an operatic baritone. A woman in navy attentively makes notes.

When they have a moment, still fully costumed, they huddle around kerosene-fuelled braziers. Rest pause for the principals; sharing the single canvas recliner; moth wings folded, hands beneath the long front panels of their robes.


Furry caterpillars, black and white, looped up under fleece on the bark of an oak tree; each bristle furnished with even smaller filaments, charged with an irritant. Don’t try to remove them. Note the location.

Inform the authorities.