Bertie and his magic anorak — one panto that hasn’t long to run

HE was a hard-working boy, Bertie, but dull. As an apprentice he was reliable, always willing to agree with others.

But as the years went by, his master the Sorcerer sometimes despaired that Bertie would ever make the grade.

He never seemed to be able to capture the spells the harder he tried to pronounce them, the more likely he was to turn frogs into lizards, or bananas, or anything except the princes the Sorcerer liked to create from time to time.

But Bertie kept the Sorcerer's cave spotlessly clean. And he was always courteous to the visitors who came to pay their tithes to the Sorcerer the big man in the golf trousers, the man who owned every inn in the town.

Sometimes the Sorcerer's accountant would come, bringing his huge ledgers with their tiny, neat handwriting. The accountant and the Sorcerer would retire into the inner room, and Bertie would bring them tea in the Sorcerer's fine bone china.

He would listen as they talked about places with strange names, like Ansbacher and Cayman. But as hard as he tried, he could never remember the names in later years his mind would go completely blank whenever those names were mentioned in his presence.

Now and again, the peasants would grow restless. Sometimes they would gather together and shout that the Sorcerer was bad for the village.

They believed that the spells he was brewing in the cave on the hill were blighting their crops. When some of the more comely maidens of the village disappeared, there were dark rumours that the Sorcerer had bewitched them and that he was having his wicked way with them.

Of course, the Sorcerer could have cast one of his more malignant spells over the entire village, and then they would have been sorry.

But who would pay the tithes then? The Sorcerer was full of scorn for these peasants after all (whatever about the maidens), what interest would he have in failing crops, since he took a share of every ear of corn that grew in the village?

So when they were revolting, he swallowed his contempt, and instead sent his loyal apprentice out to talk to them.

But Bertie was more than just a loyal apprentice. The Sorcerer had given him a gift after a couple of years' training, when he was sure that Bertie would never tell about some of the goings-on in the cave.

It was a magic anorak that looked like any other villager's coat (certainly not at all like the fine silks from Paris that the Sorcerer always wore). But whenever Bertie put the anorak on, all the villagers fell under its spell.

Whatever they said to Bertie, it seemed that he agreed absolutely with them. And even when he was talking to two villagers who disagreed violently with each other, when Bertie was wearing the anorak it seemed that he was completely on the side of both of them.

After Bertie had gone, the villagers would sometimes fall to fighting again about whose side he was really on. But they could never quite remember the things he had said everyone seemed to hear him differently. So the Sorcerer's apprentice grew in influence.

The Sorcerer relied on him increasingly to keep an eye on the villagers, and the villagers turned to him whenever they were more than usually afraid of the sorcerer. And while he wore the anorak, he was always successful in resolving rows and conflicts in the village.

Then came the fateful day when the Sorcerer called Bertie to him.

"I've grown old and feeble, my young apprentice," he said, "and I can no longer withstand the powerful enemies who would wish to take control of my magic. So I have decided to go home, to my fastness north of the village, and to let you have my spells for safe keeping."

Bertie was stunned no longer the apprentice, and now a magician in his own right, with the opportunity to take charge of the village.

With his remaining strength, the Sorcerer cast one last spell, this time to wipe Bertie's memory completely clean of everything he had seen in the cave during the years the Sorcerer was in charge. And then, in a flash, he was gone, no more than a memory.

We can draw a veil over the next couple of years. While Bertie practised the spells in the darkness of the cave, sometimes wondering if he would ever get the hang of it, others (especially the wizard Albert, whose spells seemed to blow up around his own feet) tried to run the village.

BEFORE too long, however, the villagers turned to the humble apprentice who seemed to be on everyone's side at once. For a long time, the Sorcerer's apprentice, now finally a sorcerer himself, wove powerful magic.

Over the next five or six years, the village grew rich, the villagers lazy and content.

The sun seemed never to set on Bertie's village, and he gathered around him a team of minor magicians who could make hospital beds appear wherever there was a queue of patients, or build roads everywhere and fill them to overflowing with cars, or invent a new grant for everyone who wanted one.

Bertie kept a close eye on his villagers, and an even closer eye on his team of magicians. Whenever one of them seemed to believe he was as powerful as Bertie, something would happen to make them realise that there was room for only one Sorcerer in the village.

Magician Charlie, for instance, thought he could do no wrong, then suddenly he became a laughing stock in the whole village when he helped some of his friends build a set of very expensive stables that would only accommodate a few of the villagers' donkeys.

But little by little, things began to trouble the villagers about their new Sorcerer. A lot of them related to the past that time, for example, when Bertie had spent weeks climbing trees to the north of the village, apparently looking for something but never able to find it.

But the real problem was that the magic suddenly wasn't working. The villagers didn't seem as secure as they used to be.

There wasn't as much money to go around as before, and the new Sorcerer didn't seem to know how to deal with the situation. His spells, which had seemed almost infallible for a few years, had stopped working.

Many years later, when Bertie had gone the same way as the old Sorcerer one minute all-powerful, the next all washed up the villagers would sometimes reminisce about the old days. What had gone wrong, they wondered.

How could someone who had been as popular as Bertie suddenly lose it all? And that's when they came to realise that it must have been the old Sorcerer's doing after all. Clearly, he couldn't bear the thought that his apprentice would last longer than he had in charge of the village.

That's why, when he disappeared, he had taken Bertie's magic anorak with him. And without the magic anorak, the sorcerer's apprentice was never going to be a true and all-powerful wizard.