What if the Knights of the Round Table were really bullying villains?
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Clare Pollard has written five volumes of poetry, the first of which, The Heavy-Petting Zoo (1998), was published when she was only 19. But in recent years, some of her most intriguing work has been her literary criticism – not least her book Fierce Bad Rabbits (2019), in which she invited us to rethink the stories we read as children. How, for example, did so many of us fail to pick up on the Orwellian horror in Roger Hargreaves’s Mr Men books, in which Mr Neat and Mr Tidy make Mr Messy’s house as neat “as a pin”, then forcibly bathe him until he is transformed into a faceless pink blob – “the basis of Mr Messy’s entire identity erased”?
And as for Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit books – oh dear. “The Little Grey Rabbit is saintly,” Pollard writes. “In the first book, her servile relationship to Squirrel and Hare is deeply uncomfortable… She looks like their maid… Whether she is modelling the behaviour of a housewife or a servant, the message is that some people can be violated.”
This most exacting of readers has now written a children’s book of her own, inspired by the Arthurian myths and aimed at readers of eight-plus. “Welcome to Camelot, the home of King Arthur,” begins The Untameables. “Yes, it’s real… This is a land where there is still enchantment.” But what follows is a far cry from the stories we absorbed from the Ladybird Classics. Instead, Pollard directly entreats the reader to question how the Arthurian legends came to be. “Perhaps you’re thinking: hang on, I thought those Knights of the Round Table were nice guys!… But history is written by the powerful, who can never resist tweaking it a bit.”
So, in Pollard’s version, the stories are retold from the perspective of a timid 10-year-old servant, Roan, who works for the brutish Sir Lionel: “In the usual tale [Sir Lionel is] portrayed as a lordly defender of Britain… In actual fact [he] is a blonde-haired thug.” As Sir Lionel and his fellow Knights busily wage wars and slaughter magical fauna, the ordinary people of Camelot are suffering from a mysterious illness. Can Roan (and his friend Elva) beat the Knights on their quest to find the Holy Grail, and restore health to the kingdom?
Folklore has been a frequent theme in Pollard’s poetry, and she writes with the precision of someone thoroughly at home in her milieu. “Wyverns are small members of the dragon family that breathe frost instead of fire,” is typical of the sort of matter-of-fact explanation slipped into the narrative. The plot moves briskly, and the engaging, chatty prose will find much appeal with younger readers. As for older ones, Pollard takes us back to the tales of our childhood and – as with Little Grey Rabbit – makes us think it all out again.
The Untameables is published by Emma Press at £9.99. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
