Bang in the Middle. Robert Shore

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СКАЧАТЬ lunch at the visitor centre, where my mother declares herself astonished by the freshness of the rolls. (‘Who’d have thought you’d get such fresh rolls in Edwinstowe?’ she says with genuine wonderment, holding the admirable sandwich up for us all to coo over. She doesn’t then go so far as to actually eat it – she doesn’t really like food – but she’s still eulogising its memory a couple of days later.)

      Like the Major Oak itself, the centre isn’t particularly spectacular – but that’s no surprise since Midlanders don’t go in much for ‘look at me’-style self-congratulatory display. They hold a festival here every August in ‘celebration of the life and times of the world’s most famous outlaw’, with jousting, falconry displays and court jesters by the dozen, so that’s probably the best time to come if you want the medieval scenery to be painted in for you. You hardly need it, though. There’s an ancient atmosphere here that you can still tap into if you give it a chance; you’ll soon find your imagination responding to its promptings. That friend of Keats wrote another sonnet, in 1818, on just this theme:

       The trees in Sherwood Forest are old and good,

       The grass beneath them now is dimly green;

       Are they deserted all? Is no young mien,

       With loose slung bugle met within the wood?

       No arrow found – foil’d of its antler’d food –

       Struck in the oak’s rude side? Is there nought seen,

       To mark the revelries which there have been,

       In the sweet days of merry Robin Hood?

       Go there with summer, and with evening, go

       In the soft shadows, like some wandering man,

       And thou shalt far amid the Forest know

       The archer-men in green, with belt and bow,

       Feasting on pheasant, river-fowl, and swan,

       With Robin at their head, and Marian.

      As I begin reciting the lines to Hector, a little boy dances past in a Robin Hood outfit, armed with a bow and arrow, and the portly, balding man whose hand he’s holding metamorphoses into Friar Tuck; the woman behind them with the twelfth-century face and courtly air might be a royal lady-in-waiting come in disguise to pass vital secret information to Maid Marian. The trees begin to rustle in the rising wind and suddenly you can hear weary travellers clip-clopping their way through the fairytale wood, full of mystery and danger; as darkness begins to encroach, the eyes of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men blink into life in the undergrowth. Hazlitt was right when he said, invoking Keats, that Robin Hood ‘still, in imagination, haunts Sherwood Forest’. There’s still magic in this salvaged tuft of the ancient Forest of Sherwood all right.

      ‘Dad?’

      Hector, who has momentarily laid his Ben 10 figurine aside, can obviously feel it too.

      ‘Yes?’ I say expectantly. He is wearing his most angelic smile.

      ‘Dad … Can we please never come here again? It’s really boring.’

      Oh well. No quest worth the trouble is ever that easy. The Midlands wasn’t built in a day, you know, and its reputation won’t be restored in a day either. Later that evening as I prepare to wave Hector and his mother off at the railway station – Hector has school the following day and his mother has better things to do than to go scouting for foundation myths in Mansfield – my wife asks when they can expect me home again.

      ‘Why, when I have staggering tales of Midland glory to tell, of course!’

      ‘Oh. I hadn’t realised this was adieu rather than au revoir,’ she laughs.

      I do my best ‘hurt’ face. The train is about to leave.

      ‘Only kidding,’ she smiles. ‘I’m sure you’ll discover lots of interesting things.’

      Hmm. I’ll show her – or, rather, the Midlands will show her! By the time I’ve finished, coach parties of French tourists will be jamming the approach roads to Warsop. You’ll see.

      

       The importance of Goose Fair, a prawn sandwich with a Midlands-denier, and proud to be a scab

      ‘Who wants to barf?’ A couple of dozen thrill-seekers, encased behind an ominous-looking grille, gamely raise their hands in response to the MC’s taunting question, and the ride – one of those terrifying lurching contraptions designed to toss you around like an old pair of jeans in a tumble dryer – suddenly comes to life, whipping its human cargo screaming into the air.

      You can hear the low rumble of Goose Fair as you walk towards it from Nottingham city centre and cross Forest Road, home to my alma mater, Nottingham High School, and the city’s red-light district. (My mother told me a joke when I first came to school here: One day Thor is walking along Forest Road when he bumps into a young woman in torn stockings with a big smile on her face. ‘I am Thor, god of thunder!’ the Norse deity booms. ‘Well, I’m thor too but I’m thatithfied,’ lisps back the young woman. Eleven years of age and not exactly worldly, I had no idea at the time why it was supposed to be funny. Mother, what were you thinking?) The fair’s current home, the Forest Recreation Ground, lies about fifteen miles south of Edwinstowe and the Major Oak, but it too used to be part of Sherwood Forest. In the nineteenth century, as urbanisation gripped, this particular stretch was known as the ‘Wastes’, and there was a grandstand to accommodate spectators who gathered to watch horse racing and the other entertainments held here. Today, for the fifty-one and a half weeks a year when the fair isn’t in town, the Rec is used for sports and as a car park for Park-and-Riders.

      The origins of Goose Fair’s name are lost in the mists of time. The annual gathering, for a long period the largest in Europe, was first held around 1284. Geese obviously played a part – it’s been suggested that they were brought over from Lincolnshire and even Norfolk in their thousands, their feet coated with tar and sand to help them survive the journey, to be sold in Nottingham at the onset of autumn. The fair may have begun with fowl – it’s always been held at the beginning of October around Michaelmas, when geese are a traditional treat – but by the eighteenth century it was most renowned for its cheese. There was even a cheese riot in Nottingham in the 1760s, with discontented locals bowling the overpriced produce, conveniently supplied in wheel-like units, down the hills leading out of the Market Place, where the fair was held until 1928. The mayor, protesting against the rioters, is said to have been knocked off his feet by one of the cheesy missiles and to have landed, with severe consequences for his dignity, in the mud of Wheeler Gate.

      There’s not much in the way of cheese or geese on view nowadays – apart, that is, from the large plastic goose that sits proudly on the Gregory Boulevard roundabout for the fair’s duration every year. The character of the gathering СКАЧАТЬ