A Hundred Words for Snow (NHB Modern Plays)

Tatty Hennessy

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788501392
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Depicting a teenage girl's solo journey to the North Pole with her father's ashes, A Hundred Words for Snow is a complex, epic and undulating story by Tatty Hennessy that pitches themes of death and rebirth against a shifting backdrop of climate change, exploration and the uncertain geography of the North.

A monologue play, A Hundred Words for Snow was first performed at the Arcola Theatre, London, in 2018, and was the winner of a VAULT Origins Award for outstanding new work from the VAULT Festival theatre programme in 2018.

It was revived at the Trafalgar Studios in the West End in January 2019.

'Inspired and fast-paced, filled with taut observations and brilliant humour… [has] creativity and joy running throughout' - LondonTheatre1

'A real gem… warm, witty, and like its central character, heavily layered' - The Stage

'A blockbuster of how the very pointless nature of human endeavor is what makes us so brilliant' - Exeunt Magazine

'Extraordinary' - A Younger Theatre

RORY, female, fifteen.

When you get to the end of something, it’s hard to remember the start. Hard to remember how it began. Like, what was the first step? And how far back do you go? I got on a plane. And before that, a train, and before that, I walked. I took the ashes after I found the journal after I went into Dad’s study after the crematorium curtains shut which was all after I sat at the kitchen table and stared at a spoon when Mum said that he’d died. Which was after he died. But even that’s not the start, is it? How can that be the start? Because the notebook wouldn’t have existed without the history and the history wouldn’t have happened without the geography and none of it would’ve happened at all if all the skin of the world hadn’t cooled and settled the way that it did and the oceans hadn’t flowed the way that they do and the ice didn’t freeze the way that it does, if the earth hadn’t stopped exactly this far from the sun, if the sun never formed then I, Rory, me, here, hello, would never have been sitting watching my mum cry in a helicopter in a snowstorm with my dad’s ashes at the North Pole.

Jesus you already look lost. Okay. Here goes. Strap in.

My name is Rory.

Yes, I know that’s a boy’s name.

Yes that is my real name.

Yes, really.

Oh, alright. Full name. If you really need to know; Aurora. Yes. Aurora.

Mortifying.

I swear the only people who like weird names are people with names like Bob or Sue or Tim. You like it? Try living with it. It’s weird to think Mum wanted me to be the kind of person who’d suit the name ‘Aurora’. I wouldn’t want to meet that person, would you? Sounds like a right bint.

I’ve totally forgiven her, as you can tell. Joking.

Nobody calls me Aurora. Call me Rory and we’ll get on fine.

And this – (The urn.)

Is Dad.

Say hello, Dad.

Dad doesn’t say anything.

He’s shy.

RORY gives us a small smile. She’s testing us.

Used to be a lot more talkative. Didn’t you, Dad? Lost a bit of weight, too.

Balances the urn on her outstretched hand.

It’s weird a whole person’s in there.

This is Dad’s story, really.

He died. Obviously. Car accident. Walking home from school. He’s a teacher. At my school. I know. Mortifying. And a geography teacher. The worst. Sorry, Dad, but it’s true. They didn’t let me see the body before we got him cremated. I say ‘we’ but I didn’t have anything to do with it, and actually if you ask me I think he’d’ve hated being inside a shitty urn for eternity but nobody did ask me did they so here he is. The funeral was fucking awful. The coffin like, slides behind these red curtains, and all I could think about was how many other people must’ve been burned in there and how unless they’re really good at sweeping there’s probably little bits of other people still in there with him and I wondered who they were and what their family thought about when the curtain shut. Mum did a reading but she was a total state, like, crying so much she couldn’t even get the words out which was actually a blessing cos the poem she’d chosen was rubbish. He would’ve hated it. And all my dad’s work friends which basically meant all my teachers coming to ours for sandwiches and relatives I never see saying empty things like ‘oh well, wasn’t it a lovely service’ and I’m like actually my mum cried so much she couldn’t string a sentence together and then they burned my dad in a fire so lovely isn’t really the word for it, Aunt Carol.

I didn’t say that. Obviously. I made the tea. People can’t talk to you if you’re busy making tea. And if they try you just say ‘Sugar?’ like that and they get distracted. I went to stand in the garden, just, breathe a bit and fucking Mum’s out there. Crying. Again. Leaving me to talk to everyone by myself. Very responsible. I go to leave as soon as I see her but she’s already seen me so I’m stuck and –

MUM. Hello, darling.

She says. Since when does she call me ‘darling’.

RORY. Alright.

Pause.

MUM. D’you want a cup of tea?

RORY. No thank you.

Pause.

RORY. Great.

When there was a lull in conversation Dad used to hold his hands up like this –

RORY waves her hands like claws and makes a little bear sound.

Awkward paws.

I don’t say that.

MUM. It’s nice how many people came.

She says.

RORY. Yeah.

I say.

RORY. What are we gonna do with Dad?

We brought him back from the crematorium and he was just like, on the kitchen table.

Mum sort of flinches.

RORY. He can’t stay in the kitchen, can he?

MUM. Rory. Just. Not now. Please.

RORY. Like a bloody pepper mill.

MUM. Rory. (Beat.) I’ll figure something out.

She says.

MUM. Just. Leave it. For now.

Her face is red from crying. She’s looking at me, with this funny look, like she’s trying to remember my face. And then she looks away and she says.

MUM. It was a lovely service, wasn’t it.

And I go all cold inside. And I say.

RORY. No. It was rubbish.

And I go inside and up to my room and I don’t come down again till morning.

And when I come back down the kitchen is quiet. All the guests have left. Mum’s in her room. Hiding from me. I feel bad, like I should apologise, make us breakfast or something but then.

Dad’s on the kitchen table. In his urn. Just. Left there. So I’m gonna have to deal with him, am I?

I pick him up. I can hold him in one hand. He feels cold.

You can’t stay in here, Dad. People eat in here. Nothing personal but it’s creepy. Come on.

I decide to take him to his study. You can wait there, Dad, till we figure out what to do with you. I pause at the door. I half-imagine I’m gonna open it and he’ll be sitting there in his dressing gown, leant over marking some workbooks. But that’s stupid cos he’s in my hand, isn’t he?

I open the door. And it’s his study. And nothing’s changed.

The thing about my dad is, he was an explorer. Not literally of course. Literally he was a geography teacher but in his mind. And not these shitty TV explorers who drink piss for the cameras, like Bear Grylls, god what a bell-end, no, like a proper old-school explorer. Mungo Park or Shackleton, you know? The-blank-bits-on-the-map explorer. That’s who he really was, inside. When I was little we’d go to the woods and pretend we were the first people ever to go there. Take our compasses and cheese sandwiches and make our own maps, mark trees with chalk. He’d set me treasure hunts, put an X on the map and I’d have to get us there, and we’d arrive and the treasure would be, like, an interesting tree he liked or a river with some notable erosion. I’d try to get him to give me clues, tell me what it was we were looking for, but he’d just say, ‘We’ll know it when we get there.’ He taught me to figure out north from the stars. The Pole Star. If you know where north is, you can always find home, he said.

His favourite was the North. The North Pole. Explorers like Franklin and Peary hauling sleds over ice. Polar bears and furs and scurvy and Inuit. Have to call them Inuit, not Eskimos, according to Dad. And when I was little I thought it was ace. We’d build igloos in the garden and he’d pretend to be a polar bear and chase me, and I tried to imagine it, a place where men’s tongues froze to their beards, where houses were made out of blocks of ice, the ground under your feet could crack open and swallow you whole. You know how all kids avoid cracks in the pavement? Mine were cracks in the ice.

But I got a bit old for it all, you know. And anyway it was only pretend exploring. I’ve got all the maps of everything on my phone, now. It’s all finished. No blank places left. Exploring now is drinking piss for the cameras. He was born in the wrong time, my dad. That’s what someone should have said about him, at the funeral.

We stopped going on our adventures. I took down the maps from my walls. And I’d sort of forgotten about it. The North and the snow and the beards. But I carry Dad into his study and there it all is. Maps of the Arctic Circle and posters of beardy men in thick furs looking moody, articles and clippings about global warming all over the walls, books and books and more books with big bold font on the spines. Man’s books. Dad’s books. And there on the desk is his notebook.

His journal.

His pen is on the desk next to it. It’s okay to read someone’s diary if they’re dead, right? Like, we read Anne Frank’s in school. So.

I put Dad down on the desk. I sit in his chair. I look at the notebook. I open it.

‘North Pole Trip.’

It says.

North Pole Trip.

And I remember.

I remember lying in our makeshift igloo on white sheets for snow. I remember Dad saying, ‘One day. One day we’ll go, Rory. When you’re older. Would you like that?’ I don’t remember saying yes.

I flick through the notebook. Careful plans. Weather charts. Tour operators, chartered-flight companies. Names of strange places.

Barneo. Longyearbyen. Cost estimates. For two travellers.

(To Dad.) You planned it.

‘North Pole Trip.’ It says. And ‘Next year.’

Next to the notebook, a book with a black-and-white cover, a photograph of a young man with serious facial hair and deep eyes staring out at me. Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen. I remember this book. Dad used to read it to me instead of a bedtime story. A great Polar explorer, one of Dad’s faves. Some of the pages are dog-eared, folded down. I open to one. He’s underlined passages in blue and black ink.

‘Alas! Alas! Life is full of disappointments; as one reaches one ridge there is always another and a higher one beyond which blocks the view.’

Well fuck that.

Fuck that. Fuck disappointment. Suddenly it’s all so clear. What to do with him.

(To Dad.) Dad. You never got to go. But I can take you.

So it’s not quite as tricky to get to the North Pole now, but it’s still bloody hard. I’ve got to look at the maps, make a plan. It’ll be like an old treasure hunt, right, Dad? And I figure if I’m going to go, I can learn a bit from the people who went before. The beardy men. And it’s funny, a lot feels familiar, half-remembered. The names come back to be quickly. The facts and stories Dad told me coming back in dribs and drabs. Like that thing about Inuit having thousands of words for snow? You probably heard that one. Well it’s total bullshit. A myth. Anthropologists making shit up. Funny what mistakes get stuck like that.

And ...