ENTER THE PENDRAGONS

May 25, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

The class teacher was discussing different jobs held by the parents of the students. When she called on little Johnny, she asked, “And what does your father do, little Johny?” Johnny replied matter-of-factly, “He’s a magician.”

“Really,” the teacher enquired, “What is his best trick?” Johnny responded quickly, “That’s easy. His best trick is sawing people in half.” “Wonderful,” exclaimed the teacher. “Tell me, are there any more children in your family?”

“Yes, teacher,” little Johnny answered, “I have a half-brother and two half-sisters.”

Although I was an only child, my father was a magician too. He would be walking straight home and in the blink of an eye he would turn into a rum-shop. The fact that he could do so without gesturing hypnotically like Mandrake the Magician, my favourite comic hero during my childhood days, was astonishing. Even more astonishing was that my uncles could also do the same trick with amazing rapidity.

This made me aware that the spirit of magic (among others even stronger) flowed in my veins and I could get a Princess like Narda and a faithful sidekick like Lothar if I played my card tricks right.

Alas, poor Tony! Fate played a dastardly trick of its own on me and turned me into a writer. I suppose it was always in the cards. Still, it is better by half than most other skills even though in these days of murder and mayhem, in Trinidad especially, while the pen continues to be mightier than the sword, an Uzi or Howitzer might be better.

Over the years, my love of magic has almost kept faith with my passion for reading fiction maybe because they both require considerable doses of what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief.”

Since Carl Jung, the philosopher, says there is nothing like coincidence but there is synchronicity, it is incredible that Coleridge’s creation, “Xanadu”, the stately pleasure dome of Kubla Khan is also the name of Mandrake’s high-tech home. Jung himself dabbled in astrology and alchemy. He calmed the fears of his mentor, Sigmund Freud with the reassurance, “For a while longer I must intoxicate myself on magic perfumes in order to fathom the secrets that lie hidden in the abysses of the unconscious…”

My magic perfumes are much more mundane. An early film on “Houdini” starring Tony Curtis was a start. If Houdini could escape being chained and locked in a safe, I could do it too. One afternoon recess my friends in the village school tied my hands behind my back and then bound my ankles tightly with the rope that a farmer next to the school used to keep his little brown heifer from straying into the school yard.

They added a dirty handkerchief borrowed from one of the girls as a gag. She warned me, “Don’t bite it or spit on it or I will tell the headmaster.” That was a threat to take very seriously since Mr. Forde, the headmaster, had already given me eighty strokes with a leather strap so I did not want a repeat, desiring as I did to put that experience far behind me.

My friends then stole the chain from a young bull the farmer had tied to a mango tree and wrapped it securely around me on the same tree. Then they forgot about me rushing off to school before the bull, which had started pawing the ground, could attack them.

My parents knew that I stayed at school to play “stick-em-up” or “police-and-thief”. My cousins who went to the same school thought I had left early. Fortunately, Mr. Jagroop, the farmer, heard that his cattle were loose. He leisurely left the rum-shop, one of those my father normally turned into, to look after his animals and me. It had been an anxious time as the young bull gave every indication that he wanted his chain back, probably to give to the heifer with whom he seemed ready to consummate a long and fruitful relationship.

Mr. Jagroop was not pleased, neither was Mr. Forde to whom he complained.

From those bovine beginnings, I graduated to the exploits of one of the greats. Jasper Maskelyne was one of a family of stage magicians. Accounts of his brilliant work during the Second World War can be found in his autobiography “Magic: Top Secret” and David Fisher’s “The War Magician.”

Maskelyne was commissioned during World War II to set up a camouflage unit in Egypt. He built a complete army (trucks, tanks, even soldiers and pot-bellied officers) out of canvas and wood and made the British forces seem much larger than they actually were. In June 1941 he disguised the port of Alexandria by building a model of the city and its famous lighthouse in a bay three miles away. Each night, the model was lit up while the real harbour was shrouded in darkness; as German bombers zeroed in on the model, explosives were set off to enhance the illusion.

Each morning, the decoy was covered and phony debris was scattered throughout the real port, convincing spies and passing planes that the bombing had worked. He “hid” the Suez Canal by constructing a revolving cone of mirrors that created a wheel of spinning light nine miles wide. This dazzled enemy pilots and left them so disoriented that their bombs missed the target.

David Copperfield, one of great modern illusionists, stunned the world by making the Statue of Liberty disappear. The Pendragons (Jonathan and Charlotte), who are doing a repeat performance in Trinidad this weekend, have won awards for their work which they describe as “physical grand illusion”.

According to Wikipedia, “Their show includes a number of illusions with which they have become particularly associated, including ‘Interlude’ in which a woman crawls through a man’s chest. They were the first artists to perform this trick. They are revered by fellow magicians for their version of ‘Metamorphosis’. This illusion won them a place in the 50th edition of The Guinness Book of Records under the heading of the ‘Fastest Transformation Illusion’.

Another ground-breaking illusion is ‘Clearly Impossible’, a sawing-in-half trick designed by Jonathan. Its distinctive feature is a transparent box that allows the audience to see Charlotte from head to toe throughout the trick. In 1996, for the finale of the third of NBC’s World’s Greatest Magic television specials, the duo made 25 show girls vanish and then re-appear in front of a live audience at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.”

They are so good that the Trinidad Government is hoping that they could make all the crime and murders disappear. The Trinidad people, on the other hand, are hoping that the Pendragons can make the government disappear or at least saw them in half.

*Tony Deyal was last seen quoting Charlotte Pendragon whose ballet teacher, Eugene Loring, made her class sit in front of a mirror undressed and stare at themselves. If, as she said, “We all looked like in his words, a bunch of fat race horses…” even their magic can’t help me.