The memory only resides as the crude, blocky images that old memories tend to end up becoming. As such, it is almost a certainty that it will become a vivid hallucinogen reality, should dementia ever set in.That I was reminded of it all was during a conversation which led me to ask:
GT: Did you ever do that dragon slaying thing at primary school?
Name changed to protect the innocent: Do you mean where you had to work out how to defeat the dragon?
GT: Yes! You had to find the dragon and defeat it.
Name changed to protect the innocent: Yeah – that was good fun. You had to answer some questions in class from the workbook and then in groups of 3 you got to go to the computer in the corridor and play the game. It was - I think - called, "Through the dragon's eye". It was on one of those big floppy discs! We used to think the graphics were so -.
GT: - ...never heard of that. I was put on a public bus, taken to a house and had to hunt an actual, proper dragon.
From what I recall, it was a day trip out of school. We were taken to one of those large detached houses in the New Town. A witch met us at the door and, in a room where black-out blinds were half-drawn over tall windows, she told a tale of a fierce, fire breathing, Dragon somewhere in the house’s upper floor. But it was worse than just that. The dragon, you see, was far more dangerous than what we could have possibly imagined: it had learnt simple mathematics.
The witch hoped we could help her defeat it by reminding her about potions and solving the dragon’s elementary arithmetic puzzles it had set as mental traps along the way.
With witchcraft, dragons and sums, it was the anti-Bible world way before Disneyland’s Harry Potter Waltzer ride.
[Now Bible World: there was a school trip. Before you start thinking I am even older than math dragons, Bible World was a modern attempt at making the history of the written Bible cool for kids. Kids who were all too aware of Nintendo GameBoys.
Bible World, despite its cheque writing name, turned out to be a largish vestry room in a converted church where you could talk to a man in sackcloth who said he was a monastical scribe from circa 1300AD and busied himself by copying out bits of Biblical verse on parchment with a feather that had a Biro in. The claim (and main selling point) of a virtual simulator of a shuttle craft that would transport us through the Galaxy, and therefore through time itself, to the Biblical era was no more than a boxed off part of the room where there was seats and a 19” computer monitor showing the Windows “Starfield” screen saver. We had to get our hands stamped off that monk for that! We had to, otherwise the Space Border Control Officer waiting at the false room wouldn’t less us go past him and sit on one of the office chairs to watch the screen and hear the recorded booming voice of St. Jerome telling us about his life, while the pilot jiggled about in front]
In the morning we had to train. As anyone knows, you can’t simply get off a number 44 bus, listen to a witch’s plight about a dragon savant and march upstairs. That is suicide in a basket. Nope – you need skills. It turned out that those skills were using poster paints and sticky crêpe paper to create a picture of a dragon and then change from school shoes to gym plimsolls and act out being a dragon until lunchtime. That part made a bit more sense: A “to know your enemy you have to become your enemy” sort of Sun Tzu.
After a spot of packed lunch in the garden, we were to begin searching the upper floor for the room with the dragon in. But while we had been out, plotting our strategy over a packet of Space Raiders, the dragon, we were told by the witch, had come down stairs (obviously smelling our meaty bones) and had managed to stand in some of the paint we had left out when it heard us returning, in quick retreat.
This was the break we needed. The math dragon’s one mistake. We followed its painted foot prints. Occasionally the witch would stop to ask us to solve a times-table question, scrawled by the dragon with chalk on the floor. We were obviously getting close, the questions were getting trickier: 8x7 – Clever girl.
Eventually we got to a door and solved the long multiplication question to open it. Inside, in the corner, was the dragon! The witch asked us what to do? “Throw the potion!” and she did and closed the door. “That’s it! You have defeated the Dragon! The land is safe! Oh thank you, brave children!”
Are you sure? Do you want to maybe open that door again and check? Because on reflection it seemed to be just a kind of semi-mechanised papery contraption merely in the shape of a dragon. It had smoke coming out of the nostril holes but that could have been from a smoke machine which, unless it has a touch of asthma, would account for the wheeze noise. And it had red bulbs for eyes. Maybe this was a well executed rouse and the dragon is still at large? Was it not all too convenient, you know, when you consider the situation?
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In fact, now I am thinking back on it, I am pretty sure that she was a teacher acting or something and not a real witch.
What the hell was actually going on?
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