I’m
not sure why this meme came through on social media recently. I mean, any more
than any of the “do you remember princess phones/poodle skirts/roller skate
keys” memes.
If
you don’t recognize it, it’s a vaulting horse, used for gymnastics. (In the
Olympics, women use the horse to vault (think: Kerri Strug); men use it for
upper body routines.) I recognize it, but not because I’ve ever seen it in use,
much less used it myself.
When
I was around junior high age, I picked up a paperback copy of The Wooden Horse, by Eric Williams, at a
used bookshop on East Colorado Boulevard. That was in the days when E. Colorado
was seedy and you had to be willing to push past the winos to get to the used
book stores. I was.
(These
days it’s Old Town Pasadena, and you have to pay big bucks to valet park your
car while you eat at the trendy bistrot-du-jour. If there’s a book store of any
stripe there, it’s got expensively distressed plank floors, exposed brick (possibly
faux) walls and free-trade organically-grown hand-roasted coffee served in an
eclectic array of porcelain-like cups. And nothing in the store costs less than
$10.95, including the coffee.)
The
book is a fictionalized account of a real escape by RAF officer Williams and
two fellow POWs from Stalag Luft III
(yes, the camp of The Great Escape,
although a different compound). The schtick was that the vaulting horse would
be carried out to an open field in the camp, with a man and a shovel hidden
inside. The horse would be set down in the same place every day, the man would
dig a tunnel under it, and each afternoon, men would carry the horse, the man
and dug-up dirt back to the barracks, where the dirt would be distributed.
(They covered over the opening to the hole, but I disremember exactly how that
was done.)
So—a
bunch of guys would carry the horse (which had to be not a trivial weight),
with one or two men inside, out every day. Then a larger bunch of guys would
vault over it throughout the day with enough verisimilitude that the German
guards never questioned what it was there for. Then they carried horse, men and
dirt back. Remarkably, to my mind, in light of the fact that they all knew that
they weren’t going to benefit directly from this repeated exercise.
Eventually
the horse hid two diggers, and at the time of escape (October, 1943), three
men. All of them made their way to Sweden and back to the UK.
Now
here’s my conundrum, as a junior high schooler, reading about a World War II
POW camp populated mostly by RAF officers—a world thrice-removed from my life,
with respect to the horse—I had no earthly notion of what the man was talking
about. I knew what a vaulting horse was—it looked like this:
I
knew it looked like that because that’s what we had in our school gym. How the
hell could you conceal anything, much less three men in that contraption?
The
paperback book had no illustrations, and there was no handy-dandy Internet then
to come to my rescue. I went through the entire escape narrative without being
able to clearly visualize how Williams and his mates did it. It wasn’t until
some years later, when I found another edition of the book, that it became
apparent. (I never saw the 1950 film based on the book, but here’s a still from
it.)
So,
when this meme made its way to my feed, what I first thought of was not gym
class, or how old I may or may not be, it was of the ingenuity, perseverance
and teamwork of comrades to support a crack-brained escape scheme over a period
of months, back in the days before princess phones, poodle skirts and roller
skates were even a thing.
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