Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales

chris ponders his career as a history writer and decides to stick with cats

Ionce wrote a book about the English Civil War while working in an office in High Wycombe. This says a great deal about my overall work ethic, and how superfluous to requirements I must’ve been, but it did finally enable me to escape that office, even if its management probably didn’t notice I’d gone.

Death, Destruction and a Packet of Peanuts is a light look at Civil War battles and the battlefields as they are today – including pubs on the battlefields, so it basically amounted to a shallow pub crawl through the Civil War with some history thrown in.

While taking breaks from writing, and not wanting to get involved with anything I was actually supposed to be doing, I often gazed out of the window at a park called The Rye. In probably one of the greatest oversights by any history writer in… eh, history, I failed to realise throughout the entire writing of the book that The Rye was a major Civil War battlefield with two pubs on it.

In my defence, the reason I didn’t know was that virtually nobody else did either. It was while having a pint in a pub elsewhere in Wycombe that a small wall-plaque caught my eye. From a distance I could see it was about the Civil War so I walked over to take a look – and my jaw literally fell open:

In 1642, a battle took place on the open land known as the Rye.4000 pike men commanded by Captain Hayes beat off an attack by Lord Wentworth’ s troops. The fighting lasted several hours in which an estimated 900 Royalist troops were killed. Around 300 of Parliament’ s soldiers were killed defending the town.

This was incredible. Nowhere in Wycombe’s historical records, which mentioned only minor skirmishes, did this battle appear. This was big, with large numbers as well as high casualties!

It’s amazing moments like these that send you off into a world of your own. For maybe two full minutes my mind drifted, imagining the clash of steel against steel out there on The Rye, right outside my office window.

The moment you arrive back from that world of your own can be embarrassing. To find yourself leaning heavily across a table with your jaw hanging wide open and your eyes glazed is bad enough for the mind-drifter, but worse for the couple at the table, whose previously pleasant view of one another had deteriorated into a few stolen glimpses around my head.

I immediately stood bolt upright, alarming the couple even further.

I tried to get more information from just about everywhere but nobody, including various historians, were aware of the battle.

Weeks later, a Wycombe library employee I’d been hounding finally found what I’d been looking for. The long-forgotten papers I uncovered showed that the battle was even bigger than the plaque claimed, involving 10,000 men!

So there it was. I’d written a book about major battlefields, while staring at a major battlefield, which I didn’t actually mention.

This is why I should stick to writing books about cats.

Chris Pascoe is the author of A Cat Called Birmingham and You Can Take the Cat Out of Slough, and of Your Cat magazine’s column Confessions of a Cat Sitter.