Round Yarmouth with Bosoms and Besoms

Praise be - after a horribly dull week, Plough Saturday dawns brisk and sunny and off goes I with the Norwich Kitwitches on their now-traditional visit to dance the Molly for the citizens of Great Yarmouth.

Serious traditionalists will explain that Molly dancing is a uniquely East Anglian form of other centuries-old ritual dancing like Morris, Sword, Border and Clog, possibly linked to pre-Reformation community celebrations around the Twelve Days of Christmas and particularly Plough Monday. The dances are simpler and slower than Morris and there's none of that fancy business with bells and clean hankies. (It has been cruelly said that if Morris is danced a foot above the ground, Molly is danced a foot below it!) Common features are blacking up of faces, dressing in women's clothing, and the collection of money - a vital supplement to the household economy at a thin time of the year for agricultural workers. Possibly the simplest explanation for its abiding popularity, however, was given by the Kitwitch who looks like unnervingly like my Auntie Annie: "All the best hobbies involve alcohol, violence or cross-dressing, and Molly dancing gives opportunities for all three!"

Kitwitches sprang (or lurched) from the collective loins of Golden Star Morris around fifteen years ago, inspired by a reference in an eighteenth-century document in the NRO to a Norwich custom, around Christmas and Plough Monday, of men dressing themselves in women's clothes and going from house to house dancing, playing music and begging. There must have been something in the air generally in East Anglia, because Old Glory (East Suffolk) and Ouse Washes (Lynn area) also rediscovered their roots around this time. Kitwitches dress up as women, though with Golden Star being a mixed side, some of them are actually women dressed as men dressed as women. (It is at this point of the story that people start to look nervous and edge further down the bar.) Visualise a group of pantomime dames doing a very vigorous country dance in cords and hobnail boots and you'll get the basic idea.

Anyway, after alarming the regulars at a nice pub near Yarmouth station, which was pressed into service as a dressing room for the donning of wigs, gowns and pinnies, the inflating of balloon bosoms and the trowelling-on of make-up - some of the younger ones looking worryingly winsome - off we went to the Market Place, where they stomped and twirled with great vigour and passers-by were most generous with contributions to the potty. Pitstop in the Mariners - now that's what I call a proper pub, real fire, splendid selection of ales and home-made pickled eggs! I Shall Return. More dances outside the Co-op, including the one where ancient brassieres do service as garlands ("And Turn! and Lift! and Separate!") then we head across to the Feathers, where the usual warm welcome and lovely grub await after a final set outside the Help the Aged shop. Where the young man behind the till is about to have a Very Bad Afternoon. He holds it together reasonably well until the last of these strange people - the one whose orange Ma Larkin sweater reveals shiny boobs in Canaries colours - waves a pink lacy bra at the middle-aged woman waiting quietly to pay for a paperback - "Do you think this will fit me? I need a bra, this string arrangement doesn't really work." So I peer at the label, tell Howard that a 44DD should be fine and hook it up with mutters of "It goes round OK but am I squashing your balloons?". Off he prances, bra on the outside, leaving the young man saying weakly, "What an afternoon, they all came in at once, there must be a party somewhere..."

A bit of a session and a bit of a dance in this nice cosy pub, then we walk back to the station. "Don't fancy yours much, Kev" cries a voice, but we didn't stop to find out which one he did fancy!

Kitwitches will be joining Ouse Washes tonight for a Plough Monday celebration at Northwold, but for me that's it until May morning. See you then, lads and lasses (without the dresses) and thank you for starting the year right.