posted on 27 Sep 2016

An afternoon in Polyphemus’s cave

One advantage of having a brother who was five years older than me was that I could pilfer his comics and magazines and not have to spend my own pocket money on them. As a young teenager he developed a penchant for those magazines that were published in weekly or monthly parts and his favourite at the time became mine too – Look & Learn. Although they only came to me second hand when he’d finished with them and  quite a lot of the content was well beyond me, there were stories in there I could read and get absorbed by. I was always quite a solitary child – or more accurately, I enjoyed my solitude – and so getting lost in a magazine story was great.  My brother lost interest in Look and Learn and moved on to the dreaded Understanding Science (bewilderingly he went on to get a doctorate in mechanical engineering or some such malarkey) and I was left to inherit a heap of old Look and Learns to drift through as I pleased and that seemed to me to be the height of luxury at the time.

One day when I was flipping through my pile of Look and Learn I stumbled on a story which, it turned out, was one part of a running series comprising of rewritten abridgements of the adventures of Odysseus and his journey home from the Trojan wars. I’m not sure what Homer would have made of this Bowdlerisation but I was entirely entranced. The episode I’d happened upon was the outwitting of Polyphemus the cyclopes in his cave  and I was filled with a sort of thrilling terror that kept me coming back to read it again and again. If I close my eyes I can still smell the cave I conjured up in my mind – rank with dead creatures and rotting meat – and the despair as men are plucked up by the one-eyed monster and devoured on the spot. I can, even now, remember the tension I felt as Odysseus and his men first blind Polyphemus and then disguise themselves as sheep to slip past him as he guards the exit to the cave. What an adventure.

Of course, I had no idea what the origins of this tale were or that it was a version of one of the greatest stories ever told. Nor did I know how to pronounce these odd and exotic names – Odysseus and Polyphemus - or what on Earth the Trojan Wars were. But none of that mattered because the power of the story, the elemental nature of the clash between a human hero and a dreadful giant, needed no background knowledge to understand.

Having exhausted the story by constant rereading I had hooked onto the fact that this was just one episode in a much longer set of adventures and so I went looking through my pile of magazines to find the rest. I did find some more – the episodes with Circe turning the men to swine, the song of the Siren and the land of the Lotus Eaters – and while I gobbled them down they didn’t hold me gripped in quite the same way as the dreadful encounter with the cyclopes.

This was, however, my first encounter with the whole world of Greek myth and I owe the creators of Look and Learn a substantial debt of gratitude for so skilfully bringing the world of Homer alive for me. It could so easily have been different – a more faithful and less adroitly handled treatment of the stories could well have turned me off them forever – but as a result of their efforts over fifty years later I can still see, smell and feel the emotions I had when I first read them. 

 

Terry Potter

September 2016