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Friday, February 29, 2008

The Duck Pond of Manor Park

Gosh! It's been a little while since my last post, and I wanted to get another in before the month end just so my February tally reaches an astounding three instead of a measly two. I actually started this post a while back, but lost it accidentally due to Human Error. Anyone who has lost work in this way knows that it's hard to muster the enthusiasm to write the same thing again! But, with a great strain of effort, here we go...

In the Five Find-Outer section on EnidBlyton.net I've mentioned Geoff, an old mate from school. Not seem him in years, but anyway, he was my Enid Blyton buddy. We collected and shared the books, in particular the Five Find-Outer mysteries, and virtually lived the lives of Fatty and his gang in the best way we could. Nothing is ever quite the same of course. We lived in Aldershot, which is not exactly your quaint, picturesque Blyton village. We didn't have a river nearby, so in our world the River Walk to Marlow became the Duck Pond of Manor Park. We never found an ice cream shop, but instead frequented a cafe called The Gorge. We didn't know any kind, high-up policemen, or any hot-tempered bobbies (although I did once get told off for riding my bike on the pavement). And as for mysteries... well, as Pip used to say, they just don't grow on trees.

Going back to The Gorge for a moment... This place was fascinating to us. It was a two-storey cafe in the middle of Aldershot town, and the staircase and upper floor were made to look like caves. Literally, you'd walk up the staircase and duck around the protruding "rock" walls and ceiling, and make your way to a booth table that sits in a carved out hollow. Very cool, except that for some reason the owner had painted the cave walls bright orange. Still, this was "our place," where we sat with cups of tea and discussed all manner of things — usually in lieu of a good juicy mystery.

Part of the fun of being "in a club" is having badges. Thinking back, I guess we had a Secret Seven period where all we wanted to do was form clubs and make badges, just for the sake of it. Being the "artistic" one in the class, it fell to me to create the badges. I actually created some flip-open types; when you held it up, the bottom half fell open like an FBI agent's ID. Unlike the FBI though, my badges were made of paper and all the identification details were scrawled in ink. Still, in our school days, nobody could reproduce these advanced badges in the same way, so owning one was enough to grant access to our club. And the club's name? Well... all right, if you must know, it was simply Lion's Club. There. Yes, go ahead and laugh. But the last laugh is on me, because Geoff and I were co-founders of the best secret club in Aldershot.

The fact that we only had two long-term members is neither here nor there. Several other friends (some of them random kids from class) wanted to join, just for a piece of the badge-wielding action, but nothing really came of it and there was none of the loyal camaraderie as experienced by the Secret Seven. It was more like when Susie and her friends wanted to join in, just for a laugh. But Geoff and I didn't care; at the end of the day, we only needed two in our club to imagine mysteries.

But one day, two friends indicated an interest in joining in with whatever it was we were concocting. Colin and Jason wanted to be part of it. This might have been because Geoff and I had hinted about being involved in some mystery or other; it was a surprise when they believed us, but this is where The Mystery of the Hidden House got a sudden revival in our heads. Colin and Jason were a real life version of Ern Goon, and our mystery, though utterly made-up, needed some fleshing out.

We sought the help of a kind, elderly lady next door to Geoff, and asked her if we could tape an interview with her. She was happy to help, and so we asked all sorts of questions about a "burglary" that had taken place a week before. I wish I'd kept the notes for that recording, and especially the tape itself; what I'd give to hear that now! In any case, although I don't remember this at all, we must have played that tape to Colin and Jason and had them goggle-eyed with eagerness to be involved, because the mystery moved on to the next step: Arranging a meeting with the suspect.

Okay, so this was where we fouled up. We should have stuck to laying false clues like sweet wrappers and bits of grey flannel cloth. But no, we were so chuffed with ourselves that we went straight for the jugular... and missed. You see, Geoff was always the tallest kid in the class — way taller than anyone else — and that made him the prime candidate for pretending to be an adult. We arranged an "innocent" meeting with the burglary suspect, and at the last moment pretended that Geoff couldn't make it due to some chore or whatever. This meant that Colin, Jason and I would meet the "suspect" and surreptitiously interview him about his whereabouts. The suspect was Geoff in disguise; his father's thick-rimmed glasses and long green coat (with hood pulled up in suspicious manner), together with his natural height, made him look like an adult... Well, from a distance anyway. But as soon as he got close, Colin and Jason (who had been nervous up until now) just groaned, called us losers, and went home. And that was that. Our mystery ended abruptly.

Who needs unimaginative types anyway? Lion's Club was just fine with its two founding members. We laid on a number of treasure hunts for each other, one of us laying clues for the other to follow and puzzle over. Although it was more a case of one being just a step or two ahead of the other. Today this would have been much easier, what with mobile phones; but in those days we had no such thing, and so it meant using telephone boxes and other mundane methods. On one occasion I was in the process of laying clues for Geoff. I went to good old Manor Park (at a spot right next to the duck pond) and dug a hole to bury a suspicious tin containing Secret Documents. Once safely buried, I hurried to the telephone box (just outside the park gates) and phoned Geoff to give him instructions. As I left the kiosk, a gang of unknown kids confronted me. With horror I realized that the leader had gone and dug up my precious Secret Documents, and was poring over them with great interest.

"What's this?" he said — not in an unfriendly manner, but in a way that led me to believe he was not going to let me have them back.

"Nothing," I responded. "None of your business."

"Is it a treasure hunt?" he guessed correctly. "Is it? I want to do it! So do I have to solve this puzzle? Is the next clue already in place?"

Groaning inwardly, I just told him no, it's not, and would never be now that the Secret Documents had been infiltrated by the enemy. (Not in those words exactly, but you get the idea.) That was the end of that particular hunt. I had to phone Geoff and tell him the cat was out of the bag.

And finally, in this little walk down memory lane... The Duck Pond of Manor Park. I discovered that "unimaginative Jason" was not so unimaginative after all. In fact he became one of my best friends for a few years, in my post-Blyton days. We became Star Wars buddies, and, as we grew older, Dungeons & Dragons buddies. But Jason had family issues. I didn't really understand it so well back then, but I learned that his parents weren't the happiest couple in the world, and his older brother was pretty mean and contemptuous at the best of times. Plus, Jason was overweight, and at school that's a pretty serious matter. He was "the fat kid in class." Oddly enough I hardly even noticed that he was overweight, but once his mother took me aside and quizzed me about other kids, asking whether they made fun of him or not, and I think that was when I realized how serious it was and how inwardly unhappy he was.

Where does the Duck Pond come into this? Well, the pond in Manor Park is still there today; it's fairly large, with a railing fence around it, and to one side lies what can be described as a small island. Technically it's not an island, as it's connected at one small point, but it looks like an island all the same. One day Jason seemed very unhappy and he was discussing the possibility of running away. In my innocence I was actually excited about the idea, but told him (almost sadly) that I had no reason to run away. But if we did, I continued, this little island in the middle of the pond would be an ideal place to hide out. It's heavily wooded, you see, so there'd be plenty of cover. The fact that we'd have to cower down behind bushes all day long to avoid the prying eyes of passers-by never seemed to occur to us. Or perhaps it did, and we thought only of the free bread we'd be able to feast on, if we could wrestle it away from the ducks.

Ah, such innocence. Of course we didn't run away; this was reality after all. In Blyton's books, children who ran way had a very good reason and everything turned out well in the end. In real life, children who run away get into very serious trouble indeed, one way or another.

For anyone interested, you can see The Duck Pond of Manor Park here — looking down on it, the park doesn't look very big, but trust me, it's huge. The pond, which has a squiggly path running all the way around, looks a funny muddy color here; but it's not really. The island is hard to spot, but it's there, hidden below the trees. Do you see Daisy the cow?

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