The Folklore of Discworld

supposed to appear on 13 February once every fifty years, heading for the Goodwin Sands (in the Channel, off Deal), because the first mate deliberately ran it aground there, being driven crazy with jealousy because he was in love with the captain’s newly wedded bride. This is said to have happened in 1748, and some people claim the spectral ship was sighted at fifty-year intervals up to and including 1948. Oddly, when boatloads of journalists went looking for it in 1998, it failed to appear.
    The derelict ghost ships in Going Postal are real, or rather, the way they hang suspended in the depths of the sea was once thought to be a real scientific possibility. But the wonderful image of skeletons crewing rotting hulks faded in the light of deep oceanic research in the nineteenth century. Until then, it was quite respectable to assume that water, like air, got denser with depth, and that a stricken ship would sink only until it encountered water at a density slightly higher than its own, where it might then drift on the interface until it rotted. In fact water does not compress like air, which is why fish at the bottom of the sea don’t have to drill holes in it. When you sink, you sink.
F EMALE S OLDIERS
    Folk songs, most notably ‘Sweet Polly Oliver’, keep alive the theme of the cross-dressing girl who goes off to war in men’s attire:
    As sweet Polly Oliver lay musing in bed,
    A sudden strange fancy came into her head:
    ‘Nor father nor mother shall make me false prove,
    I’ll ’list for a soldier and follow my love.’
    So early next morning she softly arose,
    And dressed herself up in her dead brother’s clothes.
    She cut her hair close, and she stained her face brown,
    And went for a soldier to fair London Town.
    The songs were based on fact, and Monstrous Regiment was only an exaggeration for comic effect – very little which is said in that book about the girls’ cross-dressing experiences was made up.
    There are plenty of references to such women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 13 (up to 1,400 of them in the American CivilWar, it has been suggested, but 500 or fewer seems more acceptable). They made the decision out of love, for adventure, or from a desire to escape from a burdensome life. They came to light as a result of falling in love, betraying themselves by lack of acting skill, or being wounded somewhere that obliged the surgeon to remove the patient’s trousers; or, quite often, by proudly admitting it much later on. When some of them were grandmothers. Obviously, we will never know about ones who didn’t own up.
    The subject is a fascinating one, and well documented. We give a couple of titles in the bibliography, but there are many more. What is interesting is how easily women could get away with it (after the not-really-serious were weeded out very early on). The Pollys often did well, acting as spies, where their wonderful skill at dressing up as women was a great help, and even getting promoted. There is a whole slew of explanations as to how they kept their secret while living with hundreds of men, and some of these turn up in Monstrous Regiment . For instance, in an age long before unisex fashions, trousers meant ‘man’ and skirts meant ‘woman’. Trousers plus high-pitched voice meant ‘young man’. People didn’t expect anything else, and saw what they expected to see. Many Pollys joined up as boys, and if the lad was a little shy, no one thought that odd. People did not often see one another naked, and the surgeon amputating a foot might only roll the trouser leg above the knee. But the big reason is that, if they are determined and careful, women can easily fool men.
    However, there was one thing, according to accounts, that many of them just could not manage. It was swearing. Many could not bring themselves to cuss, and found the ripe language of their comrades hard to bear, let alone imitate. So … a bit of a change there, at least!
    13 Indeed, more or less throughout recorded history, but this is when it happened in a major way.

 
Chapter 15
KIDS’ STUFF … YOU
KNOW, ABOUT
’ORRID MURDER and
BLOOD

     
    T HERE ARE MANY LINKS between folklore and the mental world of children, but they do not always follow the paths one might expect. Theoreticians in the Ankh-Morpork Folklore Society (and indeed in similar institutions here) love to think that some age-old memory, preferably of something quite horrible, lurks in the background of the simplest rhyme or