Mapping the hearts of the Fair and Unfair sexes
[ by Charles Cameron — an antiquarian trifle — or two ]
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As you may have noted, I am interested in the mapping of complexity — and could hardly be expected to resist the charms of this woman’s heart:
Stirred, I thought back to the map of the manly heart that my old school tried to instill in me — I was in Blucher House under Peter Willey at Wellington College, built as a memorial to the Iron Duke on the same patch of scrub land as Sandhurst and the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane…
How safe and reliable this terrain appears, I thought to myself, when contrasted with “the Open Country of Woman’s Heart” with its “internal communications, and the facilities and dangers to Travellers therein.”
Although upon reflection, my time at Wellington was not without its moments.
When Frank ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell escaped from Broadmoor, we were sent out in pairs on cadet patrol… myself and a similarly equipped companion, with our .303s and some blanks — ready at a moment’s notice to shout “Halt! Who goes there?” if the dastardly killer should pop out from behind one of our rhododendrons…
October 6th, 2011 at 9:36 pm
That map of the female heart is pretty astute. Un-PC, however. Your link to a map of the manly heart is the Waterloo map. Is that intentional?
October 6th, 2011 at 10:28 pm
Intentional indeed. I wanted something of approximately the same vintage to set beside the female heart as depicted, and my thoughts turned naturally to Wellington, where they tried their best to make a man of me, and Blucher, whose House I was in — Waterloo therefore, being the battle where Blucher famously intervened to assist Wellington, came to mind…
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Peter Willey was a remarkable man, my Housemaster there. He once apologized for the necessity, then delivered four to my rump with a bamboo cane, because I had admitted attempting to solve the Times crossword puzzle throughout the period allotted for math homework one evening.
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I am still amazed to think that this man, who was something of a war hero as I recall, and certainly someone for whom I felt admiration and affection — spent his vacations from Wellington conducting digs in Iraq and Iran, and writing the authoritative treatises on the castles of the Ismaili Shi’ites and the economies and cultures they oversaw — his first book debunking the romantic myths surrounding the Assassins and their legendary fortress in the Alamut… while his last rounded out a lifetime of research…
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I seem to have been extraordinarily fortunate in my mentors.
October 7th, 2011 at 12:01 am
What a clever post, Charles! Fascinating!