Text 1: Seven stamps out of ten, by Jo Ellerby

An original contemporary blog post.

Every summer, a farmer near us cuts a maze into a field of maize, and every summer I promise the children we will go. This year, in the last week of the holidays, we finally did: eight acres of corn taller than my head, two kids, one dog and a paper map that turned out to be almost entirely decorative.

The idea is that you find ten wooden posts hidden around the maze, each with a stamp and a question about farming, and collect the stamps on your card. We found the first post in about four minutes and felt like geniuses. We did not find the second for forty.

It is very strange inside a maize maze. The stalks rustle and whisper on both sides, and the paths all look exactly the same: green wall, green wall, dusty track, dead end. You can hear other families quite clearly, laughing, arguing, shouting ‘Not THIS way again!’, but you cannot see them. At one point my son announced, with total confidence, that he could navigate by the sun. He led us to the toilets.

Every so often a teenager in a high-visibility vest pops up on a wooden platform above the corn, waving a flag, and you can wave back and get directions. We were too proud to do this for nearly an hour. Then my daughter, who is eight and has no pride whatsoever, simply climbed up and asked.

We got out in the end, sunburnt, dusty and slightly cross, clutching seven stamps out of ten. The farmer, who was selling ice creams at the exit, told me he designs the pattern on his computer and cuts it with a GPS-guided tractor when the corn is knee-high. In October the whole thing is harvested and fed to his cattle. I liked that. For six weeks it is a puzzle; then it is just dinner.

Text 2: A letter about the maze, by Edward Wetherell

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1849, a young man tells his brother about a family visit to the hedge maze in the gardens of a great house that had been opened to the public.

Dear Tom, You will laugh at me, and you may, for I deserve it. You remember how I boasted at Christmas that no maze ever planted could hold me above ten minutes, since one has only to keep one’s right hand always upon the hedge? I have now tested the theory, and I write to tell you that it is worthless.

On Saturday we took the girls by the steamer to see the gardens, which are now opened to the public on payment of a small fee, and of course they would see nothing until they had seen the maze. The hedges are of yew, clipped very close, and stand a good head higher than a tall man, so that once within them one sees nothing but green walls and a strip of sky. I led the party in with the utmost assurance. In a quarter of an hour we had returned three times to the same bench.

Emily began to laugh, and Clara, who is younger, to cry, and an old lady in black whom we met at every turning declared that she had been in the place since dinner and expected to die there. Meanwhile, from all sides, came the voices of other unfortunates calling to one another through the hedges, and now and then a shriek of triumph from someone who had found the centre.

Our deliverance came at last from an old gardener, who sits upon a raised seat near the middle and, for the reward of a penny, will direct the lost. He had been watching us, I believe, for some time, and with great enjoyment. ‘Left, sir, and left again,’ he called, ‘and you’ll find the young lady’s handkerchief where you dropped it the last time.’

We reached the centre as the shadows were lengthening, and I own the view of the whole puzzle from there was very pretty. But I have resolved never again to boast of anything until I have done it.

Both of these texts are about visits to mazes.

Compare:

• the writers’ experiences of being lost in a maze
• how the writers make these experiences entertaining for readers

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