Memories...

The other week a friend and I were waxing on about our wargames beginnings. He said his earliest memories were fighting battles with his brothers using green army men. I have discussed my own wargaming genesis here a number of times - 54mm Britains, obsessions with the American West and the Civil War, etc, but what this discussion reminded me was that in support of my Western obsession my dad made me a model fort. My memory is pretty hazy about it, but it might have been a birthday or Christmas present. It would have measured 3 feet by 2 feet, maybe bigger, and was made of 6mm plywood. 

Now my dad was a scientist and not a craftsman, but he had grown up on a farm so was handy on the tools and he had made a beautiful job of it, all made by hand tools. It had walls that stood maybe four inches high, with firing platforms, a couple of sentry towers, gates that were hinged and had a locking bar on the inside. I filled it with buildings made from the cardboard of cereal packets (my God, I was making model buildings even back then - at the age of 10) and had hours and hours of fun with it. I have no idea what happened to this model. I guess it was disposed of eventually.

Jump forward some 20 years to the late 1980s, when we our Military Miniatures shop was in Parnell and we carried a small stock of 54mm figures, because one of our partners was himself a 54mm collector. Among that selection were a number of beautifully designed figures from the Phoenix Follies range. These bawdy figures were perhaps the most admired, but probably the slowest sellers, in the shop.

I remember that the first couple of these figures were sold to a rather quiet, well dressed man, with what sounded like a northern European accent. He came in a couple more times and bought a few more figures, enough for us to decide to import a few more, then I didn't see him for the better part of a year. On his return we got talking and it turned out that the reason I hadn't seen him for so long was because he had been in Sweden. He had business interests both there and in New Zealand. He would spend around six months in each country, a sort of never ending summer.

As we talked more he told me that he had a significant collection in Sweden and how his father had indulged his hobby by building a scaled fortress in the backyard. He described how it wasn't just a small thing, but an actual replica of a Vauban fortress with walls, bastions, ravelins, etc, all crafted in concrete measuring something like twenty feet square.

He went on say that the model had deteriorated badly because over successive winters water had frozen in the concrete and caused it to crack and split. Over that last northern summer he and his sister had decided to restore it and he had spent a lot of time repairing it. He has even gone so far as to build a structure around the model to protect it from the elements. He said the had photographs and would show me. I never saw him after that and never got to see that model.

Until that casual discussion last week the parallel of fathers half a world apart supporting their child's hobbies in a similar way hadn't occurred to me.