Free East to the Dawn by Susan Butler

real horses, equipped themselves with wooden pistols, and then settled down in the carriage and went on an adventure. Katch’s favorite voyage was a trip to a town called Pearyville, so full of exciting and dangerous happenings, so encrusted with tradition, that Katch drew a detailed map of the journey, complete with distances. In this make-believe world they all (naturally) took the roles of boys. According to Katch, it was Amelia who saved them when, along the way to Pearyville, the carriage was attacked by hairy men. They shouted, “Oh hairy men hairy men,” at the same time pointing the pistols and yelling “bangbang,” but if Amelia hadn’t remembered that the hairy men “were afraid of red” and produced a red gumdrop, they would have been carried away forever, according to Katch. There were all sorts of other dangers, too, along the way to Pearyville—night riders, giant spiders, and snakes, as well as witches, a Man of the Woods, ghosts, and corpses. There was a Bridge of Skeletons to pass over, the Old Gallows to pass, the Cave of Sighs, the Witches Cave, the Red Lion, the Robber Bridge—so many things, in fact, that although it was clearly drawn on the map, they never ever reached Pearyville. And that was part of the game, too.
    In the more sophisticated version of the game, it becomes apparent that Amelia’s later fascination with long-distance flying is just the adult, real-life version of Bogie. In youthful Bogie they would be in a carriage “dashing wildly across country to London, Paris, and Berlin” or careening down the post road to Vienna. “A knight in armor came galloping swiftly toward us. ‘Dispatches, Sir Knight!’ I shouted.” Amelia, with maps “that fell into our clutches,” embarked on “imaginary journeys full of fabulous perils.... The map of Africa was a favorite.” The carriage became an elephant or a camel, as the need arose. “We weighed the advantage of the River Niger and the Nile, the comparative ferociousness of the Tauregs and Swahili. No Livingstone, Stanley or Rhodes explored with more enthusiasm than we,” Amelia would write as she waited for her Lockheed Electra to be repaired in 1937 on her round-the-world flight.
    She loved poetry, but that didn’t stop her from appreciating the comics. They were words, too, and she was above all a wordsmith, as virtually all the letters she wrote to friends throughout her life demonstrate.
Her favorite comic was “The Katzenjammer Kids.” This strip, featuring words phonetically spelled to capture the German accent (“I tell der kink uf Sveden! ... I got a liddle bizness vot iss important! ... Lets take a ride in der airyplaner!” are representative sentences) amused Amelia so much that she appropriated the idea of phonetic spelling and for the rest of her life would weave deliberate phonetic bloopers into her letters. In 1932, when she gave Katch a copy of her book The Fun of It, she wrote on the flyleaf, “To mine angel cousin Katch from her darlink cousin Mill.” And Amelia, who had written her first poem when she was four (dedicating it “especially” to her mother), opened that world also to her playmates. She recited from memory passages from Alice in Wonderland, or Lear’s “Owl and the Pussycat,” or “Horatius at the Bridge,” and a bit later verses from Browning.
    But her favorite poem was “Atalanta in Calydon” by the popular English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and so, inevitably, Swinburne became Katch’s favorite poet and that poem became her favorite, too. Amelia always memorized great chunks of her favorites, so before long Katch, too, memorized the poem. It made such a deep impression upon Katch that seventy years later, she could still recite passages from it.
    It is a fascinating tale. The poem is a rarity in English literature—an epic poem about a warrior maiden.