Collective fantasy

Concerning the Green Children of Woolpit, Simon Young writes: “There can be few horrors worse than becoming a bit player in a collective fantasy” [FT422:25]. I just can’t see this at all.

The children were looked after well by all accounts. The boy died young, but that was common back then, while the girl went on to a respectable married life, perhaps a happy one, for a woman of her time and station this would be considered success. Their little bit of celebrity doesn’t seem to have harmed them – perhaps it even helped.

Collective fantasy is everywhere, from celebrity, sometimes destructive, sometimes beneficial, often both – to the fantasy of Nationhood – to the fantasy of law and order (no determinedly lawless population of 60 million could be suppressed by a police force of a few thousand, except by a fantasy) – to the comforting fantasy of Monarchy (a force which makes the nation feel more secure, and less frightened in the face of political chaos, but which has engulfed and consumed the lives of one family to the extent that it has subsumed their private reality completely, and yet there are certainly perks for them) – to the fantasy of scientific consensus and progress (the final arbiter of reality which changes over time and is warped by the lens of the cultural perspective it comes from, the idea scientists hold dear that they are contributing to the sum of human knowledge, when it’s clear that human knowledge waxes and wanes with the millennia, eroding and bobbing up and down in a sea of ignorance and imagination) – to, I’m sure not finally, the fantasy that we can look back and be more certain of the facts of someone’s life than they were.

Collective fantasy is a vital

functional part of human existence, but if the once green lady of Woolpit says she was from St Martin’s Land, under a green and sunless sky, I have no right to brand her deluded and pitiable because my collective fantasies say that isn’t possible.

Dean Teasdale

Gateshead, Tyne & Wear