A Baron's Tail .... A Barren Tale,.... A Ba... one of F's Hijackings (Final Friday Fiction)

.... and reference YAM Aunty's Final Friday Fiction: FFFrulz 

This tale is based on a picture created by an adult, under instruction from a 6 year old obsessed with castles and battles.  The picture, drawn on the back of a calendar, started with a rough (I prefer ‘natural-shaped’) strawberry and some verbal encouragement to engage in a session drawing some fruit, but there is no arguing with obsession.

“Draw a castle.”

Castle of Medieval-ish style duly drafted.

“Add archers”

“And a moat….. with sharks”

“Sharks?”

“Yeah sharks – and a warship, with guns.”

The adult can’t draw (or isn’t prepared to try) a 3-masted frigate with cannon decks so resorts to a modified fishing boat with something more modern by way of armaments.  Her director of art is unconcerned.

“Knights on horses.”  (In the original, of which this is the best substitute I’ve been able to reproduce on an A4 page, an additional battle charge of knights on horses was raising dust on a hill out to the left.)

“Oh yeah – and a knight with a really big axe.”

Knight with really big axe added but seriously out of scale (again to the art-director's total unconcern) but discussion was encouraged (or excuses made) about perspective and how he’s standing a whole lot closer to us than the rest of the scene.

“Now drop a bomb on it.”

“What, a bomb dropped by an aeroplane?”

“Yeah.”  So a page was taped to the top, a time-warped aeroplane drafted in (to join the time-warped warship), and bomb, duly labelled BOMB, was dropped.

At this point Father arrived home and proceeded to comment on the contents of the artistic arrangement and finished by asking why the potato was in the sky.  In all honesty it may have been him who introduced the word ‘interstellar’ into this whole creative process (credit where it is due).

In this reproduction the strawberry looks somewhat more like a standard strawberry.

 In that family, story-telling and reading together have always been part of a strong bond.  So the adult departed at the end of the evening with an idea to create a fantasy of words based on the picture, for the entertainment of the 6 year old battle commander and his (somewhat more fairy-fond) twin sister. 

Further notes to the story which follows:  They both love astronomy and had been to a number of observatories – yes even by the age of 6.  They knew that the best dark skies observatory in the world is in Chile.  They ride bikes.  They have been canal boating.

Strawberry Barons

Castle Guido was having a routine sort of day.  Archers were playing cards on the battlements.  Knights on horseback patrolled outside the moat, and near a bus-stop down the road a knight with a big axe and rusty armour stood on his lookout tower.

Inside the castle Baron Guy was cross.  His astronomer had gone on holiday and his gardener was using the best battleship to clean the moat.  Bodies from last week’s battle were still floating about and the gardener had complained that they made the place look untidy.  “Besides”, he had added, “the moat-sharks are getting over fed.  It’s making them slow and lazy.  What’s the point of a slow, lazy moat-shark?” 

“Indeed!” Baron Guy grumbled, “moat-sharks are supposed to be ravenous”, but he wasn’t happy that his best warship, bristling with guns, was being used to dredge the moat.  It was the castle’s ONLY boat, so it was definitely the BEST boat they had.

Adding to his annoyance, Baroness Erin had strumped off and locked herself in the tower after the cook served up cold porridge and murky water for breakfast. There wasn’t even any jam with it.  Baron Guy wished he could ‘strump off’ somewhere but the tower was HIS favourite place and Baroness Erin had locked herself in it, with the key on the inside.

Something told the Baron that this was all wrong.  Towers were built for locking up princesses but the key was meant to be on the OUTSIDE. In any event, there had been, in recent years, a serious shortage of princesses to lock up so he had made the tower into an observatory and installed a telescope and an astronomer.  He’d heard of the Astronomer Royal, and believed that all the best castles had astronomers.

Baroness Erin wasn’t banned from the observatory, but “she has no right to lock HERSELF IN and ME OUT” the Baron grumped.  He was hungry and bored, his astronomer had gone to Chile, he couldn’t drive his best boat round his moat, and the kitchen was out of jam.

Little did he know how soon and how much everything was about to change.

Baron Guy checked his calendar and because it was Tuesday, he decided to ride his bike down the road to the bus-stop to make sure the lookout was doing his job and keeping his axe well polished.  As he set out, high above the castle, hidden by white fluffy clouds and so far up that even its droning engines sounded like the hum of bumblebees in the wildflowers by the road,  B52 bomber had just opened its bomb doors and a comedy bomb (like you see in Tom and Jerry cartoons) was falling towards Castle Guido. (It even had BOMB written on it in large capital letters just in case any casual observer of the this scene might mistake it for one of those advertising blimps that sometimes hover above builders’ merchants’ yards.)

At the same time, faster than a speeding rocket, faster than a falling bomb, a huge interstellar strawberry, shaped like a potato, was racing towards the earth with Castle Guido right at the centre of its strike zone.

Aeroplane, bomb, castle, boat, moat and everyone within half a mile got wiped out by the impact.  Baron Guy and the lookout at the bus-stop narrowly missed total destruction but they did get splattered from head to foot in mashed strawberry.  “Hmmmmm, tastes like jam,” thought the Baron in his dazed state as he wiped the mess off himself and looked around at the flattened forest, branches dripping with red mash and all the trees pointing outward from the huge hole in the centre where Castle Guido and its moat used to be.

Picking up his bike Baron Guy slithered and skidded back down the road to see if there was anything left of his castle.  The heat of the high speed impact had vaporized the archers, fried the moat-sharks, and cooked the mashed strawberry into a lake full of strawberry jam with a very small island in the middle; all that remained of the castle keep.

 “Bother!” thought Baron Guy.  “I might have an endless supply of jam, but where am I going to sleep now? And my best boat has been blown to smithereens!”  Only then did he remember that Baroness Erin had been in the tower.  He did briefly think ‘serves her right’ but he knew he was going to miss her really.  Who would he pillow fight with, and who would help him design a new castle? 

Far away, on a boat heading for Chile, the astronomer was relaxing in a deckchair trying to recover from terrible hallucinations.  Through the castle telescope, the astronomer had seen a huge interstellar strawberry (shaped like a potato) speeding towards Earth.  Everyone knows there are no huge interstellar strawberries careering about the universe, so the astronomer was sure it was hallucination; probably caused by overwork and really bad food.

Baroness Erin appeared carrying two glasses of orange juice.  “That was a good idea of yours,” she said to the astronomer, “to pretend to lock myself in the tower and come on holiday instead.  I have never been to Chile, and I am enjoying this cruise.  It beats driving a boat round a moat.”

When they got to Chile four weeks later, they found the newspapers full of stories about a castle destroyed by an interstellar strawberry, and the miracle that Baron Guy had survived the disaster. Baron Guy gave interviews about the new business he had started selling strawberry jam, how he had cornered the market and how this would pay to build a new castle.

“I have to go home,” the Baroness exclaimed. “I’m not letting him build a castle on his own. Goodness knows what he would design.” And with that she boarded a non-stop flight back to Guido, parachuted out over that red lake so big you could see it from space, and landed by the bus-stop as if she had just stepped off the bus from Manchester.

Together Baron Guy and Baroness Erin built an empire based on strawberry jam, and became known as the Strawberry Barons.  The astronomer stayed in Chile, where the food was good, and worked every second day in a bicycle factory (no more high-speed interstellar fruit for her).

And what became of the lookout knight with the big axe and rusty armour?   Well he retired to a cottage in the Brecon Beacons where he turned his suit of armour into a rural mailbox, chopped firewood with his big axe and tended his flower garden.