Sunday, December 08, 2013
The
Fields of Dreams
The green sward stretched out before us.
Ladies in fine gowns held the favours of their champions as they sat in the
gallery waiting for the tourney to begin.
Knights, to a man, were armoured and horsed with lances held
perpendicular by their saddles. Shields protected them. Some were like
Lancelot, in disguise, willing to deceive those they loved. Some were like
Galahad, pure and unaffected by earthly temptations. There were no green
Knights as I recall.
The jousts took place at lunch break on the
village green between the school and a stone wall which became the balcony for
the fair ladies of Arthur’s court – the girls in the school’s two classes. The
lances were wooden vaulting poles. The shields were dustbin lids. The favours
were ribbons used to denote teams in PE. The whole organization can only have
come from the heated imagination of one or two children like myself who, ahead
of their reading age, loved Arthurian legend. I recall winning a joust and
galloping over to the balcony, turning to allow a young damsel from the first
years’ class to ride upon my back as I celebrated my victory. Courtly love was
everything to a nine year old.
In the winter, the battles were grimmer. No
fair ladies. Feet beating the snow, woolen-wrapped, heads in balaclavas, Brussels
sprouts stems in hand with their thick bulbous clay-bound roots and only the
ubiquitous dustbin lids to protect us, we set about each other. The lids were
dented out of shape by the barbaric onslaught of our medieval spike ball maces,
never to fit their bins again.
I lived in a world of Norse Gods and
Heroes, sagas such as Beowolf, children’s versions of Malory’s Morte D’arthur,
Greek and Roman myths. And they seamlessly elided into the modern, the Superman
and Batman comics, The Eagle, The Rover. Fantasy knew no real boundary.
Superheroes populated the imagination in all shapes and sizes and with varying
degrees of rational underpinning.
I wonder now whether my imagination was my
universe and reality amounted only to meals and sleep.
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