Guest post by Leon Burton Davies.
My two and a half year old I were having some quality time together so I decided to take her to OverWorld & Underworld. The event promised to be family friendly so along we went.
We started the ship sculpture on Briggate and followed the instruction along to County Arcade where there promised to be a performance at 2.30pm. There was no hint beforehand what the event would consist of but we arrived and waited in a large crowd in the middle of the arcade. The crowd begin to mutter to itself. Then unexpectedly, rows of children in flowing robes appeared on the walkway above the shops. They began to sing.
The arcade echoed with sound of their ethereal singing. My toddler looked up in wonderment at them with a mixture of amazement and fascination for several minutes. She was silent and motionless for ten minutes which, as parents of toddlers will know, is a rare occasion indeed. However she soon began to get restless so we decided to move on, still holding my daughter to my chest and pushing the pushchair with the other hand, I began to move my way through the crowd. Several parents who were watching their children perform tutted disapprovingly as we squeezed passed them. As we moved through the crowd I overhead someone say “That takes me back”.
We set off to try and find the next ‘event’. And although there were lots of people in logoed red t-shirts around they didn’t seem to know to where we could go next so we set off down Briggate in the hope of spotting something interesting.
En route we met some people in Victorian clothes who told me that they were “Water Carriers”. One of them bent down to speak to my daughter and gave her a tiny ornate bell to ring, it was lovely and a big hit with R who was delighted at the tiny tinkling sound it made.
Then we heard the sound of a brass band. Suddenly a crowd developed. Dancers in white and gray appeared and began to dance to the music of the brass band. I put R on my shoulders so she could see the dancers, asked if she had liked the dancers.“Yes!” She said “I liked the dancers! Can I see some more dancing?”. She looked ecstatic, like she had been watching angels dance.
We wandered down Boar Lane. The map the organisers gave us made it look like there would be performances all along Boar Lane. There wasn’t and we reached the end of the route in the underworld part of the event at the Dark Arches.
I left the pushchair at the entrance and we walked around the illuminated and strangely beautiful dark arches looking at the exhibits which neither of us understood surrounded by the sound of water. R must have liked what she saw because she kept on wanting to go further on into the Dark Arches and look into more of the ante chambers. The underground brick walled tunnel seemed to be filled with parents and their children. We walked to the end of the arches and back again. We came across some more dancers in an antechamber dancing silently in 1920s cocktail dresses. R watched with an expression somewhere between fear and amazement.
“Can I go and see the other dancers again?” She asked
We walked back to the push chair and I begin to push her out into sunlight. She fell asleep somewhere along Boar Lane.
The next Saturday R, her mother and I were again walking down Briggate. R looked around expectantly. “Will there be singing and dancing today Daddy?” she asked.
Leon used to be a long haired, socialist drop-out living in Hyde Park. Since becoming a father he is now a hard working local government employee and lives in a cottage in the countryside.