O’BRIEN: No one would accuse you of that.
4 INT. LIBRARY. DOWNTON. CHRISTMAS DAY.
The remains of tea, with a Christmas cake (no forks, no napkins). Wrapping paper shows they’ve had their presents.*
CARLISLE: Why do we have to help ourselves at luncheon?
ROBERT: It’s a Downton tradition. They have their feast at lunchtime, and we have ours in the evening.
CARLISLE: But why can’t they have their lunch early and then serve us, like they normally do?
MARY: Because it’s Christmas Day.
CARLISLE: It’s not how we’ll do it at Haxby.*
VIOLET: Which I can easily believe… Oh, this is ni— This is — What is it?
ISOBEL: What does it look like?
VIOLET: Something for getting stones out of horses’ hooves.
ISOBEL: It’s a nut cracker. We thought you’d like it. To crack your nuts.
Across the room, Edith is talking to Robert.
EDITH: Who’s coming on New Year’s Day?
ROBERT: The usual guns. Us three, and some locals. You’ll know all of them.
EDITH: Have you asked Anthony Strallan?
ROBERT: I tried. In fact, I gave him three dates, but he said no to all of them. Perhaps he’s given it up.
EDITH: But he was so keen before the war.
VIOLET: Perhaps he’s heard enough banging for one life.
She has joined them. She is interested by Edith’s eagerness.
ROBERT: Oh, and Rosamund’s forced me to invite Lord Hepworth.
VIOLET: Really?
ROSAMUND: Well, I told him I was coming down here, and he dropped hint after hint.
CORA: Perhaps he has nowhere to go. It can be a lonely time of year.
Violet addresses her next remark to Robert only.
VIOLET: Jinks Hepworth, lonely?* I find that hard to believe. Hepworth men don’t go in for loneliness much.
ROBERT: How do you know him?
VIOLET: I knew his father in the late Sixties. Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?†
* The remains of tea with the Christmas cake, but no forks, no napkins! Another bizarre stage direction. This is a tricky area, because obviously the people who have dressed the set work very hard and do their research and it must be extremely difficult to have me or Alastair Bruce, our wonderful historical advisor, walking in and changing things, relaying the places, taking the spoon and fork from the top and putting them down by the side, and the rest of it. But the point is, it’s not a question of wrong or right. There is no wrong or right. It is simply what is right for this particular group. All the different tribes that comprise English society have their own way of doing things, and we want to get it right for the Crawleys. But in this department you have to find a way to explain it all that is acceptable to the many men and women working on the show. I don’t believe I have always been successful in this.
I first had forks and napkins at teatime in Gosford Park. I was standing by Robert Altman behind the camera and I said, ‘Oh God, sorry Bob, sorry, but they wouldn’t have forks and they wouldn’t have napkins.’ He was very surprised. ‘But how will they eat the cake?’ I said, ‘Well, they’ll just break it off with their fingers and eat it.’ ‘Suppose they get it all over their fingers?’ I answered that they might think of something, but they wouldn’t have a napkin. It was quite a testing moment, because it was right at the start of filming, and I thought: either he’s going to believe me, or he’s going to believe his own team who have set it all up. I think he considered both options, but then he realised there was not much point in having me there, standing beside him, if he wasn’t going to do what I suggested. So, somewhat to my relief I can tell you, the call went out: ‘Lose the napkins, lose the forks.’
In that scene we had a wonderful bit of business, which is absolutely correct, where Maggie Smith’s character does get something on her fingers and, without talking about it, Maggie takes her handkerchief out of her bag, wipes her hand and puts it back. Which is exactly what my great-aunts would have done. That is one of the things about working with Maggie; she does have real knowledge and understanding of these people. It is very lightly worn, but the detail in her performances is invariably correct, which is thrilling to watch.
* Carlisle represents, in a sense, the world that is coming. As I have explained, I’m not hostile to him. I’ve been accused of disliking him, but I don’t at all. His ways are not entirely compatible with the ways of the Crawleys, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like him. In fact, I admire people who have made the journey he’s made, but inevitably, when you have fought every step of the way, it beats all sentimentality out of you. Whereas the weakness of great families like the Crawleys is that they want to be liked, as well. So they’re terribly nice, with lots of ‘Oh, Nanny, you really must put your feet up,’ which is designed, although subconsciously for the most part, to present them as warm and caring people, when in actual fact their demands are no less stringent than those of Carlisle, and that’s what we’re contrasting here.
But in real life, then or now, and whether Carlisle likes it or not, if you want things to run smoothly it is necessary to evolve a way of doing things that answers the needs of the family but is still acceptable to the staff. Very few people want to be served by men and women they dislike and who dislike them, and to work out an acceptable regime means ensuring a degree of pleasantness all round. At Downton, the staff have a decent Christmas lunch and the family gives them time off for it. And before anyone yells, this was not an uncommon pattern and happened in many houses. It wasn’t so much. They may serve themselves at luncheon, but they don’t clear away, and Anna makes the point when she asks if she should go up and ‘make a start on the dining room?’
Not long ago, there was an Englishman on television in America talking about Downton, because we had been nominated for an Emmy or a Golden Globe or something, and he said that I had perpetrated a great lie on the public. Obviously I found this very interesting. But the lie turned out to be that I had suggested that people like the Crawleys could be likeable. In that small vignette, you can suddenly see the extraordinary blindness that we have been led into by twentieth-century prejudice. As if a large group of people can be likeable or unlikeable. In fact, any dismissal of a nationality or a generation or a class or a race is just childish, and often pernicious, nonsense.
* When I wrote this, I had just seen the 1944 Rita Hayworth musical Cover Girl, and appearing in it was a model called Jinx Falkenburg who played herself. She was an interesting character, really, the first supermodel, and while her acting never generated much heat, she and her husband, the journalist Tex McCrary, more or less pioneered the chat show, though how grateful we should be for that is open to question. At any rate, I thought she was worth doffing my cap to, so I used her name here. It didn’t matter that Violet was talking about a man because it’s a name for either sex.
† This reaches into Violet’s past, and what fascinates me is quite when this early romance would have taken place. At the start of the show, set in 1912, we needed Violet to be about seventy. This means she was born in 1842 and she would have come out in about 1860, to enjoy a few flirtations before marriage claimed her. One of the things that always fascinates me is how quick history is and how a long life goes through two or three quite distinct eras. The Violets of this world, who were seventy-eight and very much still around in 1920, would have been young women wearing vast crinolines who visited the Paris of the Second Empire and might have been presented to the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie. They grew up in an entirely different world and yet they were still going in the 1920s, with movies and aeroplanes – and television not far off. When a branch of my family died out last year, the house and the estate were sold and I rescued some family pictures at the auction. What interested me is that I had one ancestor, a picture of whose daughter was in the sale, who was essentially a late-Georgian figure, born in 1778. The girl in the portrait was born in 1817 and she
appears as a mid-Victorian. Her child would have lived an essentially fin-de-siècle life, and her grandson would belong in the twentieth century. It all happens so fast.
5 INT. HALL. DOWNTON. CHRISTMAS DAY.
Mary emerges from the library. Matthew is by the telephone.
MARY: Isobel told me you were telephoning for news of Mr Swire. How is he?‡
MATTHEW: Not good. I’m catching the train first thing in the morning. I hope I’m in time.
MARY: Is it as bad as that? I’m so sorry.
Before he can answer, Carlisle comes out of the library.
MARY (CONT’D): Matthew’s going to London tomorrow. Lavinia’s father is ill.
CARLISLE: You’d better warn Robert if you’ll miss the shoot.
MATTHEW: I’ll be back by New Year’s Day. He won’t last that long, I’m afraid. Forgive me if I’m casting a gloom.
MARY: Don’t be silly. We’re all under the shadow of Bates’s trial. We made a pact not to mention it on Christmas Day, but everyone’s broken it.
MATTHEW: Will any of you have to testify?
MARY: Only Papa and some of the servants. But I’m going, to support Anna.
MATTHEW: Would you like me to come with you? To explain what’s happening? Or will you do that?
MARY: Richard wants to get back to work the day after the shoot, don’t you?
CARLISLE: Yes, I do.
Carson has arrived to sound the dressing gong.
‡ Lavinia Swire’s father is really the most important of the non-characters in Downton Abbey. We only ever saw him once, at her funeral, and he didn’t have any lines, but of course he has a massive part to play in the story. Matthew is fond of him, which is fine, and he’s going up to see him, and none of that I think occasions much surprise. But of course no one knows what is coming.
6 INT. KITCHEN. DOWNTON. CHRISTMAS NIGHT.
Daisy holds a huge silver cloche, which she has washed.*
DAISY: Shall I put this in one of the back cupboards?
MRS PATMORE: Yes. We won’t be needing that for another year. Now, Thomas?
She lifts the Christmas pudding topped with holly as Thomas waits. Daisy goes to a back cupboard and is moving things around to make space when she fishes something out. It is the board of a game with letters of the alphabet in a circle and an eye in a star at the centre. O’Brien is mixing some starch nearby.
DAISY: What’s this?
O’BRIEN: It’s a board for planchette.
DAISY: What’s that?
O’BRIEN: A game. Well, not quite a game. More a method of communication.
DAISY: How?
O’BRIEN: Never mind. I’ll take it, if you like.*
* We have had a huge silver cloche all my life. It’s a family one with a crest, but the only thing that it has ever been needed for is the turkey at Christmas. So once a year, even now, this thing is removed from the back of a cupboard, cleaned with enormous difficulty, used once over the space of about two days and is then returned to the darkness for the next twelve months.
* Table turnings, mediums, séances, ectoplasm and talking to your dead husband or children all made up a very strong part of the mid-Victorian culture. Planchette, which had its origins in the 1850s, was a sanitising of the frightening territory of communicating with the deceased. If you didn’t have the strength to go off to some medium in St John’s Wood and watch ectoplasm bubbling around, one answer was to buy a little planchette table and ask the dead questions yourself. Its giggle-and-chill factor made it immensely popular, and it was still around in the Twenties, only gradually receding as the Second World War drew near. I had a few experiences of it in my youth at Cambridge, and it frightened the life out of me. But that is another story.
7 INT. DINING ROOM. DOWNTON. CHRISTMAS NIGHT.
Carson carries in the flaming pudding. Everyone cheers. Carson brings it to Violet’s left. She plunges the spoon in.†
EDITH: Sybil’s favourite.
VIOLET: A happy Christmas to us all.
ALL: Happy Christmas!
EDITH: Don’t forget to make a wish.
ROBERT: Let’s all make a wish.
MARY: A wish and a prayer.
CARLISLE: Is this about Bates again?
ROSAMUND: My new maid says the servants’ hall is full of it. How terrible it is.
MATTHEW: We mustn’t lose faith. He’s been wrongly accused.
CARLISLE: I’m sure you hope so.
ISOBEL: We know so.
Carson has taken the pudding to the sideboard and now he and Thomas start to bring the double plates to everyone.*
CARLISLE: How has Mr Murray managed to have the trial held in York?†
ROBERT: I don’t know, but thank God he has.
CARLISLE: And he’s confident?
CORA: He seems to be.
VIOLET: Lawyers are always confident before the verdict. It’s only afterwards they share their doubts.
† There’s a limit to how many scenes per episode we can put in the dining room, if only because they drive Jim Carter as Carson completely mad. He has to stand there for hours on end with hardly anything to say, ditto the footmen. Those men have the toughest jobs in the series, because the others are all either in the Highclere scenes, so they get most of the time spent at Ealing off, or they’re in the kitchen scenes, at Ealing Studios, so they get most of the time spent at Highclere off. Only Carson and the footmen cross over all the time, and at Highclere they have these absolutely interminable dinners. But of course we couldn’t miss out on Christmas night.
* The key here is the double plates, which were used when anything was served at the sideboard. It was all to do with the servant never touching the plate that you’re going to eat off, which is why footmen wore gloves at dinner. The butler didn’t wear gloves because he’d pour the wine and so he didn’t touch the glass, he just poured the wine into the glass, but the double plate was used for soup. You couldn’t serve yourself with soup because all the women’s dresses would have been covered in it. So soup was brought to you but in a double plate. The servants held the under-plate, but the one you were actually going to eat out of reached you in a state of pristine virginity.
† York was one of the big legal circuits, and obviously I needed to get the trial to York, because if Bates was being tried in London where the crime had occurred, then the show would be in big trouble. I asked a lawyer about it and apparently it wasn’t very difficult to get a trial moved north. In fact, sometimes, although not in this case, trials are quite deliberately removed from the place where they’ve occurred. So there’s no kind of legal requirement for you to be tried at the scene of the crime, but obviously getting it to York does rather beg the question: how did Mr Murray manage it? We don’t know. Presumably he employed some Grantham muscle.
8 INT. SERVANTS’ HALL. DOWNTON. CHRISTMAS NIGHT.
The planchette is on the servants’ hall table. There is a glass at the centre and O’Brien, Thomas and two maids have their fingers resting on it. Daisy is watching with Shore.*
O’BRIEN: Is anyone there? Is anyone there?
The girls start to laugh.
THOMAS: You must take it seriously, otherwise they’ll be offended.
DAISY: What is it?
THOMAS: We’re talking to the dead.
DAISY: But how? They can’t talk back.
SHORE: They can. That’s the whole point.
THOMAS: Come on, Daisy.
DAISY: No. I don’t think it’s right.
O’BRIEN: If you’ll all be quiet, I’ll try again. Is there anyone there?
The glass starts to move towards the letters Y. E. S.
THOMAS: Yes. Someone is there.
MRS HUGHES: What is going on?
O’BRIEN: We’re just playing a game.
MRS HUGHES: A very unsuitable game, Miss O’Brien, especially on Christmas night. Please put it away at once.
O’Brien removes the glass, folds the board and stands.
MRS HUGHES (CONT’D): I�
��m surprised at you, Daisy.
DAISY: Are you sure there’s nothing in it?
MRS HUGHES: Quite sure, thank you.
DAISY: Don’t you believe in spirits, then?
This is slightly tricky. Mrs Hughes hesitates.
MRS HUGHES: Well, I don’t believe they play board games.*
* As I have implied, I always find planchette slightly scary. I never know what I believe about anything, to be perfectly honest, but when I was young and at university there was a fashion for it, which I followed, but with some cynicism. I did find it slightly alarming. People always say that someone must have been pushing the glass, but I’m not so sure. None of the friends I played it with would want to push the glass. That said, I suppose there must be other possibilities of a kind of shared illusion.
When I wrote this, I assumed the planchette board would just have letters in a circle, and they would use a glass to receive the messages, as we used to do in my youth. But they found a much more sophisticated version, so the glass was quite unnecessary.
* One of the things that has always interested me is the position of the Christian churches – principally the Anglicans and the Catholics – about ghosts, because they’re always very strongly opposed. They don’t like people believing in ghosts, and they certainly don’t like people dealing with ghosts, and yet both Churches have exorcism. In other words, there is absolutely no doctrinal logic in their position. The conundrum is simple: if there is no life after death, what are we all talking about? And if there is, why is the idea of a ghost so offensive and difficult?
Since both Anglicans and Catholics are encouraged to believe in the possibility of redemption through good works, i.e. a well-spent, moral life will bring its own rewards beyond the grave, then this must mean that when your life has been spent doing bad work, you will be plunged at the very least into Purgatory or some Anglican equivalent of it. Since you would presumably be full of regret, isn’t it only logical to think you might wish to revisit the scene of the follies committed in life? I’ve never, even as a child, been able to understand the Church’s hostility to the idea of ghosts, but you find it among many devout Anglicans and Catholics. Here, Mrs Hughes is put on the spot when Daisy challenges her belief in spirits. Her reply, ‘Well, I don’t believe they play board games,’ may get her out of the situation, but it doesn’t answer the contradiction.
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