A PANDEMIC TALE

 THE YOUNG MAN'S FIRST VISIT TO GOOSE FAIR

The Young Man’s First Visit To Goose Fair is a story I have been telling at every opportunity over the past couple of years for reasons which will become apparent shortly. It is in my Nottinghamshire Folk Tales book (published by The History Press 2012) 

Take 5 minutes to listen to me telling it at: CLICK HERE  

When I was researching for the book I came across a set of pamphlets called Nottinghamshire Facts & Fictions by John Potter Briscoe who was a local librarian and antiquary in the 1870s. There were several useful bits in them and when I found this story I immediately knew that it would go in the book and also, probably, into my repertoire. I assumed it was a tale which was circulating around Nottingham at the time, or else one he had made up. Either way it was a good one.

I included it in the book and the book was published and I did various gigs to plug it. I included this story in most of them. And then… months, perhaps even a year, later I was Googling something entirely different and I came upon the same story, but not set in 19th century Nottingham, it was in 14th century Florence!

It is a story from Day 4 of The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, written in Italy around 1350. I remember the Decameron from A-level English when we were doing Keats and learned that his poem Isabella and the Pot of Basil was based on a story taken from The Decameron. A decade later I discovered that the folk song Bruton Town, which I sing, is another retelling of the same tale. 

The Decameron is a set of stories—folk tales—and the frame story, the excuse for telling them, is that Florence was in the grip of a pandemic—the Black Death—so a group of wealthy young people self-isolated themselves in a remote mansion and spent their time eating and drinking and telling stories. Does that sound familiar! The book was very influential and the stories circulated all around Europe. Before Keats, Chaucer and Shakespeare dipped into it.

 Here is a slightly shortened version of Boccaccio’s version of the Goose Fair story:

When Filippo Balducci lost his wife to death, he resolved to devote himself and his young son to God. Consequently he gave his worldly possessions to charity, then took his little son to the slopes of Mount Asinaio, where they lived together in a cave, completely secluded from the ways and temptations of the world. In this remote sanctuary, Filippo taught his son about God and the saints, protecting him always from distractions and sin.

Only after the boy reached the age of eighteen did the father feel it safe to expose him to the outside world. So, the two of them, father and son, set off for the city of Florence.

Everything was new and amazing for the son: houses, palaces, churches, horses, and people. Filled with amazement, he asked his father about every unfamiliar thing, and Filippo dutifully provided names and explanations for all that they saw, that is, until they happened upon a party of beautiful young women. The boy, who until now had never beheld such a sight, could not take his eyes from them.

"Do not look at them," warned Filippo.

"But what are they?" asked the son.

"Oh, they are just geese," replied Filippo, wanting to divert the boy's attention from the young women.

"Please, father," begged the boy, "let me have one of those geese. I could put something into its bill.

"No!" exclaimed the father. "Their bills are not where you think they are, and they require special feeding. And furthermore they are evil!"

Poor Filippo now regretted having taken his son from his protective sanctuary, for even as he spoke, he realized that however clever his responses were, they were no match for the boy's natural inclinations.

 

  

It turns out that ‘my’ Goose Fair story is well known all over Europe. Here is a version from Germany:

 

A YOUNG MONK WANTED TO HAVE A GOOSE

A hermit once took a young monk to the city. He had raised him since childhood, and the old monk now wanted to put the young one to a test. Arriving in the city, they saw a number of women walking to and fro. Filled with amazement, the young monk stared at them with calf's eyes. Until now he had never seen a woman, for since his earliest childhood he had been raised in a monastery.

He asked the old monk what these things were.

The old monk answered, saying, "They are geese." The women were wearing white veils and white cloaks. 

The young monk left good enough alone and said nothing more. Afterward, when the two were back at their monastery, the young monk began to cry bitterly.

The old monk asked him why he was crying.

The young monk replied, "Father, why should I not be crying! I wanted every so badly to have a goose!"

I mentioned this discovery to a Jewish friend who lived in Nottingham and he wasn’t at all surprised. “Oh yes” he said “We have that story too, but we call them ‘the Children of Satan’!”

 

The Children of Satan

There was once a king to whom a son was born. Wise men advised that he should be locked away from the world until he was 14 years old so the boy grew up in that room and never saw any human being except his nurse until he reached that age and was entrusted to the wise men, who undertook his education. The prince was taught many things about God and the world, paradise and hell, angels and demons, virtue and sin. He was also made acquainted with all creatures inhabiting the world, and he saw for the first time in his life sheep and oxen, dogs, cats, birds, fishes, and insects. The wise men told him the names of all these creatures. When the prince saw women and asked what they were called, one of his masters jokingly replied, "They are called the Children of Satan."

One day the king asked his son which of the creatures he had seen pleased him most, and the boy replied that of all the living creatures he had now seen he found most pleasure in the Children of Satan.

The king, on being subsequently told that by the Children of Satan his son had meant women, said to him, "Beware of them, for they may lead you into hell."

 The moral of the story is that one’s ‘natural inclinations’ will always come out. In this case it is assumed that the boy will be heterosexual but it puts the lie to those people who claim they can ‘educate’ people out of being gay through ’conversion therapy’ or what have you. Why would they want to?

For more of my stories and traditional songs see my You Tube channel 

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 and have a look at my web site where you will find out about what I've done, what I'm doing and so on and can buy my books and CDs and subscribe to Facts & Fiction, the storytelling magazine I edit.

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REFERENDUMS, FOOTBALL, FOLKSONGS AND A BIT OF STORYTELLING

REFERENDUMS, FOOTBALL, FOLKSONGS AND A BIT OF STORYTELLING... 

Yes, there’s a lot happening at the moment. Those of you who’ve read my previous posts or some of my pieces in Facts & Fiction storytelling magazine ( http://www.factsandfiction.co.uk ) won’t be surprised to hear that I’ll be voting for the UK to remain in the EU on Thursday. (Or did vote for that if you’re reading this at a future date when history could have changed dramatically!) 

Recent open air spot at Belper Goes Green Festival 

Even though for the past 40 years I have concentrated on singing English songs and telling English stories the more I find out about them the more I realise that they are mostly part of a huge pan-European repertoire of folklore themes and most of the things which are considered to be quintessentially ‘British’ can be found in a slightly different form somewhere on the Continent.

Britain has always been part of Europe, for better or worse. We’ve fought wars against most of the countries and also with them. At one time Queen Victoria was called the ‘grandmother of Europe’ because the crowned heads of almost every European country were related to her through the marriages of her many children and grandchildren. 

On the football front: Euro 2016 is well underway and the England football team (soccer for those of you in the USA!) has been its usual disappointing self so far—promising a lot and then failing to achieve what it should when it comes down to it. (But fingers crossed...)

The main thing I wanted to write about here is that same competition in 1996 when it was held in England. 

1996 £2 commemorative coin

Euro 1996 was spread over the country and one group was based in Nottingham. The city put on a lot of festivities including concerts in ‘Slab Square’ (the Old Market Square in the centre of the city). I was pleased to take part in one of those.

If I’m asked what kind of venue I prefer to work in I’ll always say an intimate, in-door place where you can really communicate with the audience and build a good atmosphere but, over the years I’ve done quite a few big, open-air performances and they can be enjoyable too if there’s a nice crowd and you’ve got a good PA and sound man. At such events I concentrate on song; if I put in any stories at all it’s only one or two very, very short, jokey, ones as a break between songs. I don’t think people can listen to a story in those circumstances when there’s a lot going on and they are moving around.

The enjoyable thing about the Nottingham event was that not only did you get the local people who’d come down for the music but there were visiting football supporters too, in all their colours with scarves and shirts. I seem to remember that we had Croatians, Portuguese, Danish and others who might have been passing through rather than playing their games at the City Ground. I don’t know whether there was trouble at other times but I was struck by the friendliness of the crowds. There would be a bit of good natured rivalry and some singing of rival songs but they were  going round arm in arm, drinking with each other and with the hosts and were all willing to listen to the music. It was what sporting competitiveness should be like—no assaults or baton charges; no teargas or bottlings.

It was Europe at its best!

The Big City Bash in Derby with Popeluc

Sadly, my music—traditional English songs—would have been as ‘foreign’ to most of the English people in the crowd as they would to the visitors because, on the whole, the English know nothing about their folk culture.

I’ll quote three little stories to illustrate this:

1) Another open-air event I did was a publicity event for Loughborough Council. I was employed to entertain the passers by while other people distributed leaflets. Two of these were a young, local man dressed as a lion and an Irish girl dressed as a dragon. At separate times they both came and asked me about the songs I was singing. “What are they?” asked the lion? “I’ve never heard anything like that before.”

“Your songs are making me homesick” said the dragon. “I know they’re not Irish but they have the same feeling behind them as our folk songs.”

2) On another occasion I was playing at an event where there were a lot of Romanians. One woman came and asked me about the songs: “Are they Irish?” When I told her they were English she said she didn’t think the English had any folk music. When I assured her we had she wondered how she could have lived in London for quite a few years and never heard any on the radio!

3) Which brings me to the third story which is also linked to radio although I saw this on a TV programme. The DJ Andy Kershaw was doing a programme about the Andes and one sequence was him and his guides setting up camp for the night. When the fire was going they passed round the drink and started to sing local songs. After a while they asked Kershaw and his camera man for an English song. The only thing he could think of to sing was Ging Gang Goolie… which, far from being ‘an English song’ is described in Wikipedia as ‘a gibberish scouting song’ and it seems to have evolved in Sweden or Denmark before spreading through the scouting/girl guide world.

Britain and Europe—inseparable whatever the result of the referendum!

More info on: Pete's web site

and a lot of music and storytelling on Pete's You Tube Channel