The Mystery of the green tent

By Sarah Prospero

If you grew up bookended by brothers and your only sister was vastly older than you – 10 years older! – your first introduction to mystery novels and amateur sleuths was not the intrepid Nancy Drew but the fabulously clever Hardy boys, Joe and Frank. Personally, I scoffed at Nancy – I didn’t even like her name. I imagined her far less plucky than she was reputed to be, even kind of namby-pamby if you know what I mean, which if truth be told was a completely unfair assessment, given that I never even cracked open one of her books, let alone cracked one of her mysteries.

But never mind all that, nor Miss Tuttle, the wobbly, waddling old librarian with the wispy hair, who prefaced each of our visits to the Arnprior library with the admonishment to never judge a book by its cover – though I doubt she split the infinitive. I rejected all the Caroline Keene titles featuring pert, perfect, little Nancy’s blonde, all-American looks without a second thought.

But those Hardy boys – they were another story. Those were some good-looking detectives a girl could be interested in. Though a little preppy, to be sure, in their Oxford cloth button-down shirts and old-man cardigans, I found their looks ever so appealing, especially the way a shank of dark, shiny hair always seemed to have fallen down over their foreheads as they scrambled fearlessly up a dark stairway into an even darker attic, flashlight in hand, eyes gleaming with excitement. Clark Gable had that hair in Gone With the Wind. Joey Tribiani did too in the best episodes of Friends. Maverick, aka Tom Cruise in Top Gun, sported the same look. So, I might add, did my handsome husband. But I digress. The real reason I couldn’t get enough of Frank and Joe was that reading their adventures provided my only excuse to enter the mysterious realm of the army-green oilskin tent that my brothers occupied each summer on the lawn outside our cottage. Once inside, not only could I consume book after book of Hardy boy adventures, just as brothers Mark and Charles did, I could poke around inside my brothers’ lair.

If I close my eyes for a moment and concentrate my memory on that tent, I can almost smell the thick, pungent scent of the thick, waxy canvas, its pervasiveness coating the interior like new paint on a wall. I can hear the zipper whinge as I pull it quickly up and then back down, careful to keep out the bugs. I feel the hot air through the netting and the sun’s warmth that has been collecting in the tent all morning. There are tall lanterns with their crisscrossed hangers, unlit matches and burnt-out ones strewn carelessly beneath the lamps. There are rumpled sleeping bags, bright plaid flannel interiors exposed to the filtered daylight that streams through the walls and floats as you head into its atmosphere, hovering all around you as though you are underwater in a faintly murky, silent new world.

And there are the books, the latest batch brought home last week, due in another week; I have to be quick about the whole business of choosing one and settling down to read, a decision based primarily upon the appeal of the cover picture – Miss Tuttle be damned – and how aptly it illustrated what was suggested by the book’s never terribly fascinating title. I must also be mindful of the time because Mark and Charles, the “big boys” (not to be confused with the “little boys,” Max and Tony, who have yet to graduate to the tent) are off being boys somewhere along the shore or in the woods, hunters and foresters that they are. I know they’ll be gone a while because they are always out and about during these midday hours, when it’s too early for the beach and too late to stay in bed. They’ve taken with them their bone-handled hunting knives, the terrifying ones sheathed in tooled leather, their prized possessions.

When I lie down to read, I don’t know which sleeping bag belongs to which brother, but I do know that they will be back soon and that their reaction to my having infiltrated their lair isn’t always predictable, so I have to get down to business immediately. Some days I am welcome to be there; others, not so much. To tell you the truth, I am interested in the lives and adventures of the Christie boys as much as I am in the Hardys. Maybe more. Entering their tent is as close as I can get to them and all their fascinating boy-ness. So I am looking for clues in that tent – spent matches, GI Joe comics, shards of flint, things that will reveal to me a little bit about the mysterious world inhabited by my big brothers.

Sarah Prospero is a retired Toronto high school English teacher, now happily living and writing in Almonte, having discovered that she loves writing, especially about growing up at her family cottage on the Ottawa River.