Horsing around

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.