...riding on a donkey

It's Palm Sunday, and all kinds of memories come flooding back to me. I'm 8 years old, and we've just come out of St. Mary the Virgin church, and we all have our palms. They have all been painstakingly woven into crosses, but to an 8 year old it looks more like a tiny sword, and far more useful it was as a sword, than as a cross. For goodness' sake, what can you do with a cross, but hang it on your bedroom wall, or stick it in your Bible or prayer book. But a sword! Just think of the adventures you could have! 'Let's go to the graveyard and play pirates!', someone suggested. And so, swashbuckling our way down the lane, we opened the little wrought iron gate and did battle. All sorts of lovely graves were to be found at Marston Magna. My personal favourite was a huge stone box-like affair, made from the beautiful local Ham stone, a rich yellow, enormous. It had a lid that was laid on top, over-lapping the bottom part. Ivy grew all over this, fertilized by the bones inside, Cally said. All around the tomb was a black wrought-iron fence, to keep out robbers, I suppose. But it didn't keep out pirates! If you jumped on top of this tomb wielding your sword, you were the master of the world, just daring anyone to come aboard your pirate ship, and just see what would happen to you should you be so foolish as to try. Sometimes prisoners were taken, and God help those poor blighters! But not this day. Cally and I soon tired of the game, and went to read our Sunday stamp in the hollow tree. Every Sunday when you went to Sunday School, you were given a stamp to stick in your stamp book, and on it was a story from the Bible. This Sunday, Jesus came riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. The people were breaking palm leaves off the trees and, waving them, shouted, "Hosanna!" Well, there's only so much you can write on a stamp, so off we ran to Cally's house, down the lane, to get the whole version from her Mum, who was very keen on the Bible. What an amazing story she told us! And so inspiring! We couldn't wait to go back to church on Friday to find out what happened next. Anyway, because we were in the choir, we had to go back that night for the Evensong service; but, full of inspiration from the Bible story, Cally and I had other ideas! Unbeknownst to our mothers, we dressed up in the purple robes in the dress-up trunk in Cally's cloakroom. They had hoods. This time, instead of swords, we carried pampus grass. Giggling hysterically, we ran down the lane, and entered the graveyard by that same side-gate. We waited, hidden from sight, until we were sure all the choir children were in their places, then groaning mournfully, we waved our pampus grass across the window of the church, and wailed, "Hosanna!" The children couldn't sing they were laughing so hard, and poor Mr. Batson had quite a time of it coming out of the 1000-year old side door without it creaking its head off! We ran away screaming down the lane, sure and certain that we were protected from the wrath of the church warden, because of the purple robes. He couldn't possibly have known it was us, could he? I think Jesus would have loved our purple robes and pampus grass!