Armour

 

Our darling Phoebe is in limbo this week. Her nursery school days ended last week and next week she will enter her reception class in the local primary school - the same one that both her parents attended. But this week she is under her grandparents' supervision. On Monday her other grandmother ("Granny") looked after her all day but Shirley ("Grandma") and I have her for the rest of the week as both her parents are working.

Given the wonderful summer Yorkshire has enjoyed this year, today's weather was unusual - grey skies, rain showers  and even distant lightning and thunder. We decided to break up the day with a lunchtime trip to a pub in The Hope Valley called "The Old Hall Hotel".

After we had dashed in, Phoebe immediately noticed something in human shape standing in a corner guarding the toilet doors. It was a complete suit of armour - probably from the seventeenth century.

I hugged the figure and tapped the steel breast plate - the cuirass - but Phoebe remained daunted - not entirely convinced that there was not a medieval knight still standing within the steel suit. She had never seen a suit of armour before so this was something quite remarkable - astonishing even!

We settled down to our lunch, looking across the drenched Castleton road to Hope churchyard where dead people lie for decades on end. Halfway through the lunch, Phoebe had a desperate need to see the suit of armour again so I took her but again she could only look in amazement. There was no way she was going to touch that disconcerting metal figure from the past.

With lunch over, she checked out the suit of armour one last time and I promised to find pictures of similar suits online when we got home.

How difficult and burdensome it must have been to don protective armour in the past. Just getting the various parts on must have been a Herculean task and as for heading into battle - probably on a horse - why the weight of the outfit would have been close to unbearable. I will tell you one thing - I am damned glad that I was not a knight of yore, floundering around like a robot as swords clanged impotently upon my outer layer.