Stories from Staffordshire Review

Janet is more than a storyteller — she gives a performance

What Janet Crouch may lack in stature, she certainly makes up for in terms of telling a cracking tale.

She held us in thrall telling the tale of Margaret Sherwood and Richard Gordon who romanced under a tree at Cannock Chase. Margaret’s parents, being very respectable — they were from Hednesford(!) —disapproved as Richard was a poacher. He promised to give up his criminal ways once married, but was talked into a last session on The Chase on his bachelor night, ending in tragedy when the gamekeeper heard a drunken commotion, tripped and managed to fatally shoot himself.  Richard was hanged at Stafford and Margaret, weeping under the skeleton tree, lost her mind.

If Seth and Betty’s romance was half as exciting, I’d still be watching Emmerdale now.

Janet, showing no mercy to us at all, ramped up the tragedy by introducing us to Thomas Meakin, a young man who, wanting more than the bright lights of Leek, headed to Stone and worked for an apothecary. He was ‘fit’ and the apothecary’s daughter, to his displeasure, set her cap at Thomas. Strangely, this fit lad dropped to the ground one day, couldn’t be roused and his interment was arranged with indecent haste by the apothecary.

I’ll cruelly leave you hanging there (apologies to Richard Gordon), but suffice it to say there’s a reason why there used to be ‘Wakes’ before funerals.

Janet is more than a storyteller — she gives a performance. As a performer and storyteller, she ended by introducing a new word to my vocabulary — ‘taradiddle’. As she explained, it essentially means a story which is a big fat lie and then went on to tell her own taradiddle. By this point, I was quite ready to believe that she had indeed won a ‘sustificate’ for best Morris Dance in West Bromwich.

And if you like ALL the homemade cake, comfy and eclectic seating and proper china, then the venue for this show, K-Teas Cakes, is somewhere to worship at. Free WiFi too.