Daniel Elliker (left) and Martin Turner prior to the final of the Warwickshire Fencing Competition

Morris went almost immediately 4:1 up, exploiting a powerful fleche attack. I was fairly weary from the pool and the first two rounds — the eight fights within an hour were as much as I had done in the previous nine months. The most I could do was hold him off and attempt either to twist out of the way or to parry and riposte. By the end of the first time period, I had managed to work it up to 5:6 behind. After the one minute break, I realised that the psychological pressure was beginning to tell. Making my only attack of the fight, I was fortunate enough to step-balestra-lung, going straight past his parry to score a hit on the shoulder. This was perhaps not quite what he bargained for, and pushed him to attack repeatedly. Unfortunately for him, I had picked up the rhythm of his attack, and was able to draw him to attack with increasing speed, but decreasing effectiveness, until I was 11:7 up at the end of the second time period. In the final period he held back his attack, but, with time against him, was forced back into attacking mode, and eventually lost 15:8.

In the other semi-final, Matt Powell made an impressive come-back after being 7:11 down in a fight more characterised by the guts and determination of the fencers than by the technical superiority of one over the other. He reached 11:11 all to get back into contention, but Daniel Elliker managed to get a glancing hit which unnerved Powell, and pushed strongly to eventually win 15:12.

In the final, Daniel Elliker pushed quickly through, delivering attack after attack as I did little more than watch him. He reached 11:7 by the end of the second time period without any particular difficulty. But when he took off his mask, I saw the energy drain from his face — the exertions of the previous fight were catching up with him. Recognising that if I carried on defending as I had done in the previous fight I would be certain to lose, I took the fight to him. Regrettably my technique was nowhere near what it was a year before, and I was reduced to little better than walking up to him quickly and jabbing in a hit.

I pulled back to 13:14 behind, and I could see his reactions slowing. With about a minute left, I managed to get in a double-step-lunge. Daniel is very lithe and quick, and has long practised twisting away from the hit or doubling up to avoid the point. His counter-attack almost did for me as he pulled himself away to avoid my point, but I managed to get perhaps centimetre more than I was getting in the pool round when he beat me 5:0, and, with both lights coming on simultaneously, was awarded the point to go 14:14. Having not expected to get anywhere near this stage of the competition, I was now mortally tired, bone-weary and aching. With more or less my last strength, I fleched down his left side, landing on the piste and hitting him almost simultaneously and at the last allowable moment. There was just one light, and, for the first time, I was Warwickshire Champion.

It was almost ten minutes before I had the strength to get up again after saluting and shaking hands. Daniel had to go on to get medical attention, as he was in an extreme state of exhaustion.

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Staying on too long in parliament is like staying too long as the captain of a sports team, when you no longer have the fitness and reactions to be there. I feel this somewhat keenly at the moment, since, as of 1 January, I have stepped down from captaining the West Midlands fencing team. At the age of 43, I am more than twice as old as half of the team, and it was time to move on. The upper age for politics is rather older, but even MPs need to recognise when it’s time to go. This time, though, it’s not retirement and pension which is the issue — it’s the simple fact that MPs have lost our confidence. For some this is an unfair ‘guilty by association’, but others lost our trust because they abused it. For the good of the team, they need to be off.

It appears, though, that not everyone has got the message. In fact, we have politicians who fought tooth and nail against Heather Brooke’s campaign for full disclosure of expenses, voted against it in parliament, and then tried to resurrect their careers and put one over on their opponents by representing themselves as the peoples’ champions when the Telegraph got hold of the story.

We are expecting a number of announcements over the next weeks. Some MPs can honourably step down, having worked hard for many years for the good of their constituents. They deserve our respect. Some MPs who are expenses-damaged but still holding on should go. That way, they can win back some of our respect, and ensure that the next parliament is given the best possible start with a clean slate.

It will be a long, hard job to win back the confidence of the public. But it is a job which must be done, no matter how hard, nor how long.

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Martin Turner at his home in Marlcliff, Warwickshire.

I’m still chairman of Warwickshire County Fencing Union, and West Midlands Fencing Captain, but, sadly, I’ve had to miss the start of the fencing competition series in the run up to the General Election, which will mean that my ranking will plummet as the year goes by. For those who are interested, my best ever ranking was UK 39th in Men’s Foil, and I held on to a spot in the top fifty for a full competition season in that year.

Politically, I will be fighting for the Stratford on Avon seat at the General Election, God willing, which is expected to be May or the very beginning of June. Liberal Democrats have come a long way over the last two years: we won the biggest swing against the Tories anywhere in the UK in May 2008, and the second biggest in the County Council elections in June this year, also coming 34th out of all districts for the Liberal Democrats in the European elections which were held on the same day.

We’ve started attending Bidford on Avon Baptist Church which, if you live in the area, meets in the Crawford Memorial Hall on Sundays at 10.30 am. It’s a warm, welcoming group of people, and a good place to visit if you are wondering about God.

We are also straight into the thick of things, as Tory councillors on Warwickshire County Council have decided to axe our local Fire Station, along with several others in the constituency. Quite simply, they must be stopped.

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In the whole of literature, there are not many famous sword-fights. The ones you are possibly already thinking of, in The Prisoner of Zenda, The Count of Monte Cristo and the climax of Scaramouche, aren’t actually in the books, but only the films. The Count of Monte Cristo doesn’t have a sword fight at all. The Prisoner of Zenda does, but it’s all over rather quickly and is nothing like the one in the film, and Scaramouche, although it’s a book I’ll come back to, has an entirely different climax from the film, and that particular sword-fight — the longest in cinema history — isn’t in the book, although many others are.

Given that an awful lot of films (and not merely a lot of awful films) feature a sword fight as the climax, it may seem surprising that novels have not taken the same course. That is, until you actually try to write a sword-fight. That’s the point where you realise that what works on stage, or on film, is rather more difficult on paper. Some great film sword-fights are, alongside those already mentioned, the Princess Bride, Return of the Jedi, The Court Jester, and Prince Caspian. We’ll come back to the Princess Bride and to Prince Caspian. Although in a different tradition, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, the Banquet, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, have exemplary sword fights which put most Western tradition movies to shame. Probably the most technically virtuoso fight scenes in film are in Kill Bill volume I and II, where Quentin Tarantino relishes the challenge of including virtually every kind of modern sword-fighting.

To me, the five best sword-fights in literature are, in reverse order, the climax of Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, any of the duels in Scaramouche, the first fight scene in The Princess Bride, and the first and second duels in Prince Caspian. To the best of my knowledge, neither Chrétien, nor Rafael Sabatini, nor William Goldman, nor CS Lewis had ever been fencers, which runs rather against the common writer’s adage ‘write about what you know’. I do know, however, that Goldman was an assiduous researcher, that Lewis was steeped in the whole of English literature from Beowulf to the late Renaissance, and that Chrétien would have seen sword-fighting at first hand, and heard it described many times.

If you want to write a sword-fight scene, you might do worse than wander down to a local fencing club or visit a competition, or watch fencing on TV on the rare occasions that it is shown. You might do worse, I say, but probably not much worse. Fencing is just too fast for non-fencers to follow, and even — if we consider the number of arguments with referees at competitions — fairly hard for fencers to follow. When fencing appears in films, it is drastically slowed down. I was once an extra in a BBC television play that revolved around a fencing competition. To get it onto camera, they made us slow down to the point that it was comic.

Judging by the successes of the four authors I have mentioned, it seems to me the key to writing about sword-fights is not watching them, but reading about them.

Let’s consider the salient points. The sword fight in Yvain (Vv. 5991-6228.) is quite cerebral — Chrétien holds up the action to discourse on love. In terms of the action, it is less decisive than earlier fights, and there is less of a sense that Yvain might die. What is crucial is that Chrétien has arranged things so that Yvain is fighting — unknowingly — his friend Gawain.

Scaramouche is frequently punctuated by bouts of fighting, and, indeed the protagonist, André Moreau, becomes a fencing master, and Sabbatini must then accept the challenge of finding ways for him to be allowed to fight. The climactic bout, though, is when he faces his own father, also unknowingly, although we, the readers, have long guessed (in the film version it is his brother). Moreau initially intends to kill the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr, but is prevented because he is over eager, and causes a flesh-wound which, honour dictates, stops the duel from continuing.

The fight between Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride is, in its film version, a favourite among fencers, and, for once, the film follows the book exceptionally carefully. Rather than elaborately recounting the parries and ripostes, Goldman treats it more as an exposition of the mind of a Renaissance fencer, referencing Capa Ferro and Thibault, and describing it somewhat like a chess game, with different strategies cancelling each other out. The turning point of the fight is done rather cleverly — Montoya, hitherto regarded as the greatest fencer in the world, decides to fence left-handed, even though he is a right-hander, and is pleased to discover that the Masked Man (his name is not yet known) is also a left-hander, which pits Montoya’s weakness against the man’s strength. But Montoya discovers the man to a far better fencer than he imagined, and as he is beaten back, he tells the man “I am not left-handed”, and switches to his right hand. The fight then changes, with Montoya beating the man back, until, just before he is about to defeat him, the man says “I am not left handed either”, changes hand, and swiftly defeats Montoya, a reversal that no reader could have expected.

In his entire fiction career, CS Lewis only wrote two sword fight scenes (he has battles and fights involving swords, and he references two sword fights which have already taken place, in The Horse and His Boy, but these are the only duels between equally armed, skilled opponents happening directly in the narrative), and both of them are in Prince Caspian. Near the beginning, Edmund takes on Trumpkin the dwarf, disarming him after some moves. The climax of the book is the duel to the death between Peter and King Miraz, which takes rather longer and is, to my mind, absolutely the most gripping fight in literature. In the rest of the Narnia stories, we have swords against wolves, roll-over rough-and-tumbles, a giantess with the bar of a lamp-post beating back a crowd of angry Londoners, and a fight with a sea-monster, but no more one-on-one duels.

It would seem unlikely that Lewis simply got fed up of sword fights after having written too many in one story. The truth, I think, lies in one of the great difficulties of describing fencing of any kind: very few readers have ever done it, or done anything like it. Most readers, of course, will have fought with sticks at some point, but the similarities don’t really help. By separating the fighting into two, Lewis is able to give the explanation in the first fight, and keep the drama for the second. He begins by emphasising the deadly nature of the combat: “These swords are sharp, laddie” says Trumpkin, initially rejecting Edmund’s challenge. Lewis then goes on to explain how ‘real broad-sword fighting’ differs from stage-fighting, and from sport fencing, and briefly explores the technique — while emphasising how dangerous it all is. The fight finishes with a fencing trick that Edmund knows and Trumpkin doesn’t, technically an envelopment, which results in the sword flying out of Trumpkin’s hand, finishing the fight cleanly and safely. It’s a great moment, and important for moving the story along.

The second fight is altogether more serious, and, having explained once what broad-sword fighting is all about, Lewis doesn’t need to do it again. The second time round he is able to focus on fear, the imminent threat of death, the feeling of powerlessness among the spectators, the violence and injury of the fighting, and on the treachery of Miraz. There is nothing in the way of technical explanation to slow down the action, and there are no fencing tricks to give Peter the advantage. The turning point of the fight — described through the eyes of spectator to another — is when Peter pulls himself up, having fallen, using Miraz’s arm, a move which any reader can understand without having to know anything about fencing. The result of the fight is that Miraz dies, but not killed by Peter — rather, he is treacherously stabbed by his own side after he has fallen to the ground.

If you are taking this article at all seriously, it really is worth reading at least the scenes from Prince Caspian to get a sense of what I’m talking about. If you are writing yourself, then you’ve probably already come up against the difficulties of writing compelling sword fights. However, for the sake of clarity, here are, to me, the key issues:

speed – a sword fight takes less time than it takes to describe it

technicality – most readers don’t have the vocabulary to follow a technical description, and, in any case, even to fencers, the words are unevocative

repetitiveness – a sword fight is mainly a question of attacks, parries, evasions and blows that land, but somehow the writer must give a sense of the course of the fight

importance – for a sword fight to be the climax, it must have a relevance and a resonance that goes beyond merely an interlude in which the hero’s life is threatened

danger – a sword fight must represent a real danger to the hero, and both outcomes must be equally plausible, even on re-reading

The writers I have referenced solve these problems in different ways, more and less successfully. Chrétien’s solution to the issue of importance is to ensure that we know that if either fighter wins, then one of the main characters dies. The excitement comes from the dread of facing what appears to be a situation in which we can only lose, and the relief is when it is resolved. But Chrétien does not manage the actual fighting very effectively, and we are left with a cerebral, intellectual discussion which does little to get the blood pumping.

Sabbatini has a much greater understanding of fencing, and this is absolutely clear in his writing. Club fencers are occasionally sufficiently convinced to believe that Sabbatini’s strategy could actually be used in a match (for the record, it wouldn’t actually work). But, despite the proximity to the fencing that Sabbatini creates, the action is relatively low speed and the way that Moreau is built up as the ultimate fencer makes the outcome of the duel certain. Like Chrétien, Sabbatini relies on creating a fight whose outcome appears to be certain ruin, whichever way it goes, and then resolves it by not allowing the fight to proceed to the death, exactly as Chrétien did.

William Goldman’s fight achieves what neither Chrétien’s nor Sabbatini’s does: he makes the fight about the fight itself. Although he begins cerebrally, when the fight turns, it turns on the changing of hand from left to right, and it does it twice. In this way, Goldman manages to make the turning points happen in very few words, thus making the description of the action no slower than the action itself. He also manages to give the fight a distinct shape, which the reader can follow, with a double-reversal. But, the first time round, we do not seriously believe that Inigo is in real danger from the masked man until the action turns right at the end, and, the second time round, we know for certain that he cannot win, but will not die. Although the fight itself is tremendous, we recognise afterwards that it is, in fact, an unimportant interlude.

Lewis’s solution is actually well worth considering as a more general approach to describing sword fights. In fact, it was a solution open to Goldman, Sabbatini and Chrétien, since all of them describe more than one sword fight each in The Princess Bride, Scaramouche and Yvain respectively. By informing the reader of all the issues beforehand, when little hangs on it, and then exploiting this knowledge at the climax. Interestingly, JK Rowling takes exactly this approach to magical duelling in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which she then exploits in the climax to Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix. Although apparently different, Rowling was facing a very similar problem. Nobody reading her books would know anything about magical duelling unless she told them first, but attempting to tell them during the action would slow down the climax to the point of ineffectiveness.

We can summarise the Lewis solution as follows:

Separating the necessary information from the action

Ensuring that the danger to the hero is always imminent

Making the reversal something which is obvious to a reader who has forgotten or ignored the explanation

Using spectators to explain to each other what ‘just happened’

Using the Aristotelian devices of accidents and reversals for the excitement, rather than relying on the sword-play

Focusing on the emotions, fears and injuries of the hero, emphasising his weakness not his safe

Probably the most important clue to writing about sword-fighting is this: all the normal rules of action apply: if the writing is not exciting apart from the sword-work, it won’t be exciting with it.

Further reading
You may (but probably won’t) find Wikipedia’s explanation of fencing terms helpful.

I’ve collected the books mentioned here into a page at Amazon.co.uk.

And to read something I’ve written:
You can now get my sword-fighting novel The Skifter on iBooks (search ‘Skifter’) or at Smashwords.com. It’s just $6.99, and you can download 20% of it for free. Kindle, iBooks, and regular web-text, among other options.

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This is a great honour and a privilege, and I intend to serve with verve and diligence. I am constantly amazed by the talent, integrity and determination of up and coming Lib-Dem candidates. The party has added new parliamentarians at every election for the last fifteen years, and I am confident that this will increase at the next election.

Mind you, this role will not be taking any time away from my efforts in Stratford upon Avon. My aim is to win here at the next general election and serve the constituency with the passion and hard work.

The last twelve months have been my best ever — I was selected as Stratford upon Avon’s parliamentary candidate in February, completed a half-marathon in April, became West Midlands fencing captain in June, reached the UK top 50 for fencing in September, was honoured in a major health service award in November, reached the UK top 40 in December, and have been honoured again with this tremendous vote of confidence in January. I have to say I’m looking forward to what the rest of 2008 brings.

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I have to declare an interest at this point (actually, two interests). As the West Midlands fencing captain, I’m clearly not one of those people who believes that playing with weapons creates aggression. Actually, one of the most common faults in a particular kind of beginning fencer is that they have far too much aggression, and have to learn to focus on control. The other is a story from my childhood. As good Guardian-reading left-of-centre intellectuals, my parents decided that I should not be given a toy gun (my mother tells this story repeatedly to strangers, so I have no qualms about sharing it here). All went well up until the age of two, when the girl across the yard (we were living in Todmorden, West Yorkshire) asked me what I wanted for my birthday. “A gun”, I replied without any hesitation. As of that birthday, our house was never without a toy gun, although my life took a significant upturn when I made a wooden sword for a Sunday School play at the age of five. The sword was immediately taken off me when I arrived for the rehearsal – apparently the instruction that all the players should make and bring their own swords was countermanded by a higher authority – and I was given a cardboard sword with gold paper on it. However, the wooden sword was returned to me, and, when we moved to Stechford the following year, enabled myself and my sister to gain a place in the Rosemary Road cul-de-sac gang of under 10s when we fought off the other children in the street on our first day, all of whom had plastic swords. I digress, though.

The house I live in now contains two epees, six foils, one sabre, and a collection of broken blades which I haven’t yet got rid of. Strangely, neither the gun at the age of two, nor the wooden sword at age five, nor the fencing weapons that lurk in our hallway and odd corners of the house, nor any other toy or sport weapons before or since have ever led me into becoming an aggressive or bloodthirsty person. Competitive, yes. But you can be competitive playing chess, draughts, noughts and crosses or even (as experienced this Christmas) Uno.

The government’s report is actually no more than the common sense which (I can’t believe I’m writing this) readers of the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail have been urging on us for years. It’s in the same train of thought as last Christmas’s big hit: The Dangerous Book for Boys. “Boys will be boys”, as the saying goes, and there is a level at which they need to be allowed to be.

Don’t get me wrong on this. I’m not going right wing, and I certainly have no intention of taking out a subscription to the Daily Telegraph. But there is a point at which, as liberals and democrats, we need to look again at the politically correct consensus which (perhaps) we ourselves have contributed to: weapons do symbolise aggression. But do they make boys more aggressive, or merely symbolise an innate or natural aggression? The NASUWT suggests that letting boys play with guns is gender stereotyping. Well, perhaps. But it certainly wasn’t for me, as I had no access to the kind of gender stereotypes that promoted guns. There were no guns in the house, no picture books of guns, we didn’t have a television (it was 1968), and I’d never even heard of the cinema.

At the end of the school day, boys slip further behind girls in the UK, and have been doing so year on year for more than a decade. It’s particularly apparent in deprived communities.

On the precautionary principle, perhaps we just need to stop doing the things that stop boys being boys. Or, at least, in a liberal and democratic way, be open to the possibilities.

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