My Most Unusual Character

More than thirty years ago (!) I was walking across the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and heard a noise like a slow-motion car accident: Whack! Clank! Smack! I looked over and there was a group of perhaps a dozen or more people wearing antique costumes. The men wore armor, the women long skirts. The women were sitting in the shade of a big tree, talking in pleasant voices. Most of them were doing embroidery – if memory serves me correctly, one was spinning with a drop spindle. The men were fighting with thick sticks, not viciously but boisterously. They didn’t seem to be actors but ordinary people doing what to them was normal Saturday afternoon activity. Among my first thoughts was: Can I play?

That was my introduction to the Society for Creative Anachronism. In a few weeks I was one of them. I chose as my “personna” Margaret of Shaftesbury, fifteenth century nun. I was the only nun in our group. (I was unattached at that time and the teacher of my Women in Medieval History class had noted that the only woman in medieval times who was not under the control of some man was a nun.)

Nobody else wanted to be a serious nun at that time and I had a notion that a nun was not allowed out and around all by herself. About eighteen months later I was working at the College (later University) of St. Thomas in Minneapolis (having become seriously attached) and in their gift shop were toy Paddington Bears, hand made by one employee’s mother. I bought one for a niece and fell in love with it myself and so bought another. I stitched a tonsure on his little head, made him a black monk’s robe and dubbed him Father Hugh of Paddington. He quickly developed a personality (“a small, brown fellow with kind, anxious eyes, who mean well”) and was often taken from me and handed around at SCA events. One time he was spotted sitting on the queen’s lap during court.

I began weaving him into the stories I was starting to write about life in a medieval abbey (Deer Abby, of course). When I wrote Murder at the War, he was one of the characters. I even wrote some short stories published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine with him as an amateur sleuth.

I still have him, he’s sitting on our couch, still with that kind, anxious look on his little brown face. My most unusual character, or at least the character with the most unusual source.

If you like, comment on this blog entry and I will put your name in a random drawing for a small collection of his stories called Father Hugh Investigates. Good luck!