A Story About Robin Hood, by Me. Aged 7
In which Robin conveniently shirks his responsibilities and Marian is a modern woman, but gets her priorities all wrong
I'm currently writing my debut novel (not about Robin Hood, mind). Could this be a taste of the drama to come...?
The beauty of having a mother who is on the sentimental side (not a hoarder, but one that doesn’t like ‘just throwing things away’) is that one day she will give you all the drawings, school reports and exercise books you produced as a child/she accumulated as a parent.
Those works of art and literary masterpieces have been in my possession for a while and caused me much amusement over the years.
I made drawings aged 4 that would make your toes curl (I’m talking anatomically correct and therefore… concerning). I wrote endless stories and diary-style ‘What we did at the weekend’ entries in my school exercise books. And I have maybe not all of them, but quite a few.
This weekend my husband Keith and I switched some furniture around at home, sorting out a bookcase in the process. And there, sitting among my Beatrix Potter and Ladybird books, were three school exercise books from 1979 onwards. I had just gone up to the Juniors at primary school (I had to look this up, that’s the UK equivalent to Year 3/Key Stage 2), and my story-telling skills aged 7 were on FIRE.
I could have chosen many stories to feature here, but the story I’m about to publish — Robin Hood — has gone down in family history. It is legendary. Remember, this is long before Kevin Costner gave up on an English accent in Prince of Thieves and even before Michael Praed and Jason Connery donned beautiful blow-dried mullets in Robin of Sherwood in the 1980s. No, I was inspired by Disney’s 1973 Robin Hood (Robin and Marian were both foxy foxes) and Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood from 1938 — in colour, no less. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I was more than a little in love with both Robins as a kid =ahem cartoon fox?!=
I’ve mostly typed it out exactly as I wrote it (I’ve included shots of my original pages at the end of the story) with the same punctuation and grammar, but I did break up the speech into separate paragraphs so it’s a little easier to read, in the same way that a book formats speech. I wrote this story one month into the first term of a new school year, and I’ll never forget how it was my new teacher, Mr Wellman, who taught us how to use punctuation and write stories with speech quotations.
I took all that knowledge about punctuation and I ran with it. Speech marks everywhere. To be fair to my younger self, they are pretty much all in the right place. So thank you, Mr Wellman, for encouraging me to write stories and giving me the tools I needed.
P.S. I did correct a few tiny errors just for readability, but I left a couple of spelling mistakes that were so fabulous I didn’t want to change them. Let me know in the comments if you’ve spotted them.
P.P.S. When I read my book, I thought, Oh I spelled Marian wrong the whole way through… and went to type it out as ‘Marion’. I looked it up just to check. Nope, my 7-year-old self knew what she was doing. It’s Marian.
Robin Hood by Catherine W, age 7 and 2 months
Long ago, Maid Marian was walking through Nottingham Forest1 picking flowers. Then, the Sheriff of Nottingham came into sight.
“How dare you, Maid Marian, pick flowers on the Nottingham Castle’s field!” he said. “Take her to the dungeon.”
So Maid Marian was taken to the dungeon. While she was being chained up, Robin Hood was outside playing with his merry men2. They were playing who could shoot the tree furthest away from them with their bows and arrows. You see,3 the dungeon window was by Robin and his merry men. Then, they heard a shout of “Help!” Then they turned round and looked. It was Maid Marian, shouting from the window.
“Maid Marian!” shouted Robin. “What are you doing in there?”
“I got caught by the Sheriff of Nottingham,” shouted Maid Marian back to Robin and his merry men.
“Why?” asked Robin.
“Because,” said Maid Marian, “I was picking flowers on the Nottingham Castle’s field.”
“Oh that’s nothing to worry about,” said Robin. “We will try and get you out.”
So, Robin and his merry men disguised themselves as ducks by putting some elastic on rubber ducks and putting them on their heads. Then, they swam in the moat disguising themseflevs as rubber ducks. Then, Robin found a little gate, just at the bottom of the castle. So, he went through it and then found a metal drain. So, he tried to push it upwards, with his merry men helping him.
“Here it goes!” said Robin, and they pushed it up and across. “Now to rescue Maid Marian,” said Robin.
So they charged through a door and came into the Sheriff of Nottingham’s hall!
“There is Robin Hood and his merry men!” said the Sheriff of Nottingham. “Get them!”
But Robin didn’t agree with that answer. Robin decided to get “them”. While the fight was going on, one of Robin’s merry men went to the dungeon. First, he found a staircase. Beside it, was a sign pointing to the dungeon. So he went right to the top of the staircase. When he got there, he looked around. Then, he saw a door. It had words on it. It said “The Dungeon”.4 So, he opened the door. In there were great big black bars. Behind them was Maid Marian.
“Help!” she said. “Please get me out. The key is over there!”
So Robin Hood’s merry man lifted the key up from the table she pointed to. When he lifted the key up, he carried it over to Maid Marian and opened it up. He helped her out, because there was a big high board against it.
“Oh thank you very, very, very much. But how can we get out?” said Maid Marian.
“Oh that’s easy,” said the man. “I have got a rope in my pocket. Look.” And like so, he pulled a very, very long rope out of his pocket.5 Then, he pulled the glass out of the window hole, and dropped it on the floor. “Quick,” he said as he pushed the rope out of the window. “Climb down the rope as quick as you can.”6
Down they went. They ran to a speishell place called: “The cat’s den.”7 It wasn’t very far away. It was half a mile. Then the man heard a shout of “Hooray!” It was Robin.
“Robin!” said Maid Marian. “It’s, it’s you!” She whispered something in his ear.
Robin said, “Yes.” Can you guess what she said? She asked him to marry her. So they married, and lived happily ever after.8
The end
I haven’t read this story in quite a while, and I haven’t read it to the end in at least twenty years, because it had a touch of the prophecy in it: I actually asked my husband to marry me. I mean, way to go, Maid Marian, asking Robin to marry you: talk about ahead of your time?!
Though I have to say, I’d have been more interested in Robin’s gallant ‘merry man’. Taking the initiative to rescue Marian? A very, very, long rope in his pocket? (That’s what he said.) Pulling glass out of a window?! I’m thinking the merry man should be played by Chris Hemsworth and the story needs an alternative ending. You missed a trick there, Marian, sweetie, Robin did bugger all…
Has this story made you desperate to read my debut novel?! I’m not sure I can match the level of drama in Robin Hood, but I’ll try…
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I meant Sherwood Forest. Nottingham Forest is a football team. As he was the Sheriff of Nottingham, I think my confusion can be excused. My teacher even wrote in the margin, ‘Do you mean the football team?’ to which I replied — rather curtly — ‘No.’
‘Robin Hood was playing with his merry men’ has been a lowbrow joke in my family ever since thanks to this story.
My teacher corrected ‘You see’ to ‘Now, as it happened’… I mean, talk about wanting to improve my writing skills… who did he think I was, Hemingway?!
God, I’m really stretching out this description of the dungeon, aren’t I…
How big must his pockets have been?!
I kinda get the feeling that this merry man stole Robin Hood’s thunder. Who did Robin rescue, exactly?
Here my teacher wrote, ‘Oh Catherine, the drama of it all!’
Girl, you get rescued by this heroic merry man and you ask Robin to marry you?!
Audio narration 😍 I enjoyed listening to the post and short story so much! And wow, you were already a fantastic writer as a seven year old. Now I am all the more excited for your book. 🤗
This is an absolute joy, Catherine! Rubber ducks, signs to the dungeon, and implausibly spacious pockets. Brilliant 😂♥️