Munich, Arsenal and Frankfurt
Twenty years after Neville Chamberlain
Proclaimed ‘Peace for our time’ at Heston,
On his return from the Munich conference,
The ‘Busby Babes’ played their last ever game
In England, against Arsenal, at Highbury:
The Munich Air Crash would take so many lives and minds,
And leave a city and a nation frozen in grief;
It was a long journey from February to the summer.
But the World Cup followed the end of the season –
Pele amazed the world with his precocity –
Before close season training at Highbury,
With eyes upon the coming fixture list;
When Jack Zipes, an American student,
Would leave Coleridge, Wordsworth, Thelwall et al
On the metaphorical touchline,
To join the star players of the Gunners:
‘Yank to save Arsenal’ proclaimed the headline,
In a theatrical echo of Cold War politics;
‘All I have to do is dream’ sang the Everley Brothers,
Number One that summer.
And so it was that Jack Zipes began his journey,
Along the metaphorical left wing,
From the Arsenal to the Frankfurt School;
From Tommy Docherty – ‘The Doc’ – to a doctorate;
From Ode to Melancholy to Herbert Marcuse;
From the Lyrical Ballads to Critical Theory;
And so to radical deconstructions of fairy tales.
Let’s make dreams reality,
For the many not the few,
All I have to is dream
And just bloody vote Labour.
‘Fairy tales, including reinvented ones, seek to foster a sense of social justice.’
‘It is up to us as readers to realise the dreams and fantasies of these tales.’