Once Upon a Time

THE SARACEN'S HEAD (68 pp.)--Osbert Lancaster--Houghton M/ffl/n ($2).

Frail, timid William de Littlehampton was born in the wrong century and spent a lot of his time wishing he hadn't been born at all. Richard the Lion Heart was England's dashing monarch and knighthood was in flower; but at 20, Willie sat his horse like a sack of meal, rattled in his 12th Century armor like an ill-packed skeleton and couldn't get out of the way of his own lance and sword.

To make matters worse, his dead father, famed Sir Dagobert, had always been a very model of knighthood, had throttled a hawk at the age of two, killed a wild boar at six. Willie wasn't impressed by such accounts, but his mother, the Dame de Littlehampton, wouldn't let him forget them; she was the kind of lady who expected her only son to make his mark on the armor and the life expectancy of his foes. When she hustled poor, terrified Willie off to join King Richard's crusade in the Holy Land, militant Christianity enlisted its feeblest champion.

Willie made out all right. In The Saracen's Head, London Daily Express Cartoonist Osbert Lancaster thrusts greatness upon his unwilling hero in a bland satire that good-naturedly kids the iron pants off the whole profession of medieval arms. Written as a juvenile, it is the kind of literary fare that parents will gobble up if they can get it away from the kids. The Saracen's Head can be read in an hour, but in that brief time Willie runs his shaky lance through El Babooni, the infidel champ, is knighted by King Richard I himself, and unwillingly carries the royal standard up the walls in the historic storming of Acre.

More, he rescues a rich maiden from pirates in the Mediterranean, marries her and comes home in triumph to tell his dominating mamma where she can get off. Sir William and Despina didn't live ever after, but they did live for quite a while and got along fine. To readers who know 41-year-old Osbert Lancaster's irreverent books on English architecture and his tartly urbane Classical Landscape with

Figures (TIME, Jan. 17), the sly charm of Saracen's Head will come as no surprise. Lancaster's own illustrations, in color and black & white, are so pointed that those too lazy to read can join him in his laugh at the age of chivalry by merely turning the pages.

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