Robert Shore - Bang in the Middle

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.

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