MRS. G’S CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS

It is Monday, December the 22nd, 1958 and the world of seaside landlady Mrs. Gerrish is turned upside down. An unexploded wartime bomb has been found in the back garden of her guesthouse in Weston super mare. Old Mr. Scully from next door thinks he can remember a couple of muffled thuds during the big raid of ’42 but always put it down to Mrs. Scully dropping her boots on the bedroom floor. Anyway, Mrs. G. has to make alternative festive arrangements as she has invited a houseful of friends and relations down for the Christmas holidays. There is only one course of action open for her and that is to transfer her yuletide gathering to her estranged Brother Fred’s house in Bedminster.

So for the first time in many years Fred will be forced to celebrate the season of goodwill, something he has managed to avoid since the time in December 1914 when he tried to organise a football match in no-mans land between the Tommies and the Jerries and a fight broke out over the offside rule. His home is forcibly opened up to all those people he has spent his latter years trying desperately to avoid.

So, will nephew Brian join them there, on leave from RAF Oglethorpe where he’s stationed doing his National service?

Will Sister Doreen and her ex-GI husband Chuck make it back to the fold, their first visit home since she left Bristol in 1946 for her new life in Pratt Falls, Wisconsin?

What about Cousin Herbert who’s studying at Cambridge, or is Bedminster to far removed from those great halls of learning and his new friends like Mr. Philby and the others?

And isn’t that Mr. Terry lodging next door to Fred? Just released from a custodial sentence in Horfield for persuading the city council to build Broadmead shopping centre? Hope he doesn’t bump into Mrs. G. after the set to they had back in the summer over those saucy postcards!!

Oh, I’m sure Mrs. Gimlet promised she’d stop by with a plum pudding.
  
In this, their first Christmas show, the M.o.E. join forces with Bristol’s answer to Fred Wedlock,… Fred Wedlock…, and conjure up that wonderfully warm glow of Christmas past. With the usual M.o.E. combination of period music and oral histories, their chestnuts roasting on open fires and halls decked with boughs of that new artificial holly on sale at Terett Taylor’s up Staple hill for 2/11 a sprig, they carole their way through all things ‘Noel’ with Mrs. G. hoping that Santa will have enough left in his sack to fill her up her Christmas stockings with something more exciting than walnuts, satsumas and ‘Eat-Me’ dates.

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