The Story of Sir Balin of Hook – Lawrence Patchett

Recently I was sent a story I’d forgotten about. It starts like this.

There was a king in Wales called King Ryan who owned twelve kings, and he made them shear their beards and he put them on his cloak. King Ryan found out about King Arthur. He sent a messenger to tell King Arthur that he would be one of his own kings too, and to shear his beard – “And if you don’t I’ll get my biggest army and my best army to come over and kill you.”

It’s called ‘How Sir Balin came to be the Best Knight of the Round Table’, and it was written at the tiny rural school at Hook. It’s quite a hoot. There’s King Ryan’s preoccupation with shearing beards. There’s also an alarming body count. Seven nobles lose their heads in nine hundred words, including a ‘wee lady’ who, despite seeming innocuous enough, turns out to be the Lady of the Lake and ‘cruel and nasty’ to boot. Here’s what happens next:

Sir Balin crept up behind her like a cat catching a mouse, just ready to catch it, and slashed off her head with his sword.

King Arthur said, ‘Oh, why’d you do that?’

‘I know she’s a witch. I knew it.’

Sir Balin gets exiled for that, and so the adventure begins. It’s the strangest story I’ve written, and the funniest.

It’s easy to miss Hook School. It’s down a quiet road in South Canterbury, and there’s no town or village there, just the old school and the teacher’s house, and the hall opposite. The school closed a long time ago and now the sports field is planted in spuds. Even in the mid-eighties there were just twenty-odd kids, but somehow it was—for me, at least—a place firing with imagination and stories and books.

I suppose the teachers had a lot to do with that. The one I remember best took us kids and his hang-glider up a hill paddock and ran down it, trying to take off. He wrote a school play that I think featured Sir Lancelot. I also remember him showing me how after using a sword a knight had to wipe it clean on the grass. These are things I remember anyway; I suppose for other kids it was different.

It was that teacher who sent me ‘Sir Balin’ recently, perhaps discerning a link with the stories of I Got His Blood on Me. Certainly there is one story it makes me think of. It’s ‘My Brothers Blood’, in which Edward, a member of an animist cult, journeys towards conflict in Fiordland. Both stories have the same drive towards a violent showdown. Both central characters have a difficult relationship with the people at the top: Sir Balin because he decapitates that lady without getting the King’s say-so first, Edward because he is too divided to commit to the activist life.

And in both stories brother relationships are important. Sir Balin’s brother saves him by helping slay six kings, enabling him to pierce King Ryan’s heart with a sword (a thrust that doesn’t kill him, but does cause him to fall off his horse). In real life it can be hard to be brave without such a person there beside you. Someone like a brother. And even then it’s complicated. It’s questions like these that ‘My Brother’s Blood’ explores as well.

But discussing these stories in this way is much too serious. Really, both were written for the same reasons—for school assignments, and for fun. For the enjoyment of starting an adventure story and filling it with epic journeys and weapons and fighting. For the fun of starting with ‘Imagine if …’

And King Arthur said, ‘Aha, do you want to be the boss of all these kings do you?’

King Ryan said, in a dying kind of voice, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to.’

So King Arthur said, ‘All right, you can be one of my servants.’ So he was made one of Arthur’s servants, and all King Ryan’s servants were made his servants too.

And Sir Balin was one of the best knights of the Round Table. When he sat in the chair his name appeared on the back, and he had the highest chair of all the Round Table.