Puppet Love

“That’s the way to doooo it!”

The voice was a cross between squeaks and articulate sneezes. Indeed, this was the Punch puppet from the Punch & Judy show. It was an actual cross - as were the other puppets: Judy herself, the policeman, the doctor, the clacking crocodile, Toby the Dog .... all crude wooden crosses upon which the distinguishing gloves of character were hung. They were poked up and down within the upright canvas coffin proscenium, but the audience was often able to spot the human hands that held up such puppets - hands belonging to the voice who spoke in various versatilities of tone.

Tilted from side to side. Jabbed to and fro. Brandished at the kids in the front row. Even catapulted into the audience upon an act of dying. And when the Judy cross, along with her sausage-sizzling pan, had been brutally mauled by a crocodile at the behest of her husband Punch, she was cartwheeled upon the air straight into the tiny hands of a boy called Holo who sat in the middle curve of wooden chairs.

He was alarmed to discover that Judy’s string of sausages was as real as it was possible to be, tiny sacs of blubber with twists of their own skin between. These were in contrast to the unbelievable form of Judy herself as two thin pieces of stripped lumber nailed across each other.... with her ‘arm-width’ only of slightly less length than the height of head and handle, her tatty pink frock an old stitched-together duster with the grain of its fabric threadbared by rubbing and her face a triangle of blobs beneath a tassel of multicoloured wool.

How could Holo have been so enthralled by puppets when their cut and thrust merely involved such clumsy abortions of decorated wood?

The audience was intended to return the ‘dead’ puppets to the puppeteer after the end of the show but, somehow, that day, the boy managed to abscond with Judy. However, he didn’t have a conscience about it. No doubt, the puppeteer could easily magick up a surrogate.

The boy subsequently heard that the puppet show packed up that very same night and trundled off to other dates on the other side of the Pennines. Such live entertainments were growing out of fashion, in any event. Screens transported real things to children or, at least, what many could believe to be real. The years brought new and newer fangled phenomena in geometrical progression of frequency. Meantime, Holo grew up and became big in computers, having placed Judy in a bottom drawer along with the strange sausages, whispering to himself, if not to her, a few words of blessing: “That’s the way to doooo it.”




The Punch-and-Judy puppet show eventually returned to Holo’s neck of the woods. After all these years, the kids had to be frog-marched there by parents with time-swapping aspirations. The same curved lay-out of wooden seats, if a little more rickety. The gaping-mouthed sentry-box: with stripes fast fading into its awning’s weave. The squawky voice now with death rather than a common cold as its undernote. The puppets no different than their cross-legged ancestors all those years ago when the boy (now man) was tinier than Tom Thumb.

He watched his own small daughter amid her surly peers, as she sat squarely staring at the wooden acting. He had needed to persuade her to tear herself away from her fantasy computer games by saying that he had loved Punch & Judy shows when he was a lad.

“I don’t like any of those silly puppets - can’t I stay at home?” she said.

He had kissed her flat nose, as if to say something he couldn’t otherwise say. And, at a seamless moment in the puppet proceedings, he lost control of his own body as it dashed into the midst of the audience, intent on throwing his own daughter into the crocodile’s clacking jaws.

He prayed that his dear dead wife had not, after all, been so cruelly crucified upon the cross of their daughter’s birth. It had been their only child.... and they’d named the baby Judith.

He wept, believing this was the only way he could say how much he’d loved them both. His way to do it.

==============================




Judith Beheading Holofernes (1620)
by Artemisia Gentileschi