CSotD: Queen Alice
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I've said before that Richard Thompson remembers childhood better than anybody else working that beat, and today's Cul de Sac is both hilarious on the face of it but also a reminder of how thin the barrier between reality and fantasy was in those days.
Never mind the Tooth Fairy and other official fantasies. We also lived in a universe of fantasies made up of partially understood things mixed with games of make believe that got out of hand. We took make believe very seriously and it tended to blend with reality rather easily.
For example, one place we lived had fields behind the houses on the street. This kid who lived a few doors down stuck a drum, which was a coffeecan, in the crotch of an apple tree, together with a screwdriver that he probably wasn't supposed to have taken. There was also a small piece of paper with the codes on it, but the only one I remember was that "Come here" was two beats on the drum with the handle of the screwdriver.
He also had a second drum in his back yard, which was probably all of 30 feet away.
I suspect any two-syllable message was two beats on the drum, but the important thing was that, if you had to do it more than once, it would have been much faster and more efficient to just walk the rest of the way up to his back door and knock. Especially since, if he were anywhere but in his back yard, he wasn't going to hear the drum anyway.
None of this mattered in the slightest. The point was that we had drums and a secret code.
And my older sister watched "Lassie" the way very conservative Christians read the Bible. If it was on "Lassie," it was literally and completely true, and one element of life for Lassie and Jeff was that, if you went out into the wilderness, something would happen to you and you'd have to send Lassie for help.
The episode she fixated on had to do with Jeff getting his leg caught in a fox trap. This grave danger meant that, when we went to play with some kids who lived across the field behind our house, we had to each have a long stick with which to tap the ground ahead of us, in order to spring the fox traps so that we wouldn't get caught in them.
This was not make-believe. This was pure, sincere delusion.
For years, I thought it was some stupid thing she made up just to frighten her baby brother, but she later told me she was absolutely convinced that fox traps were lurking below the ground ready to snatch up our ankles and leave us stuck out there to starve to death, since our dog was not a heroic collie but a scatter-brained cocker spaniel who, no matter how far-flung the fantasy we might be living, we knew was not going to go get help.
Which is to say that I don't know if Dill truly believed in Queen Rattlebasket the Forceful in Panel Two, but I highly suspect he will sincerely believe in her as soon as Alice does. Though his response in Panel Four suggests that he may have just enough of a grip on reality to know how much trouble he is getting himself into.
Methinks that, before Halloween is over, Dill is going to find out just how Forceful Queen Rattlebasket can be.
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