We sent a letter in broken English to a genuine Hungarian contact who posted it to the festival. It said they were passing through on the way to another event and would like a warm up and to introduce themselves. No cost to the festival so they agreed. Emails were routed through the Hungarian contact.

We had someone turn up on Saturday, saying that he had had a call from a friend who was the Hungarian translator. Unfortunately he was stuck in Chippenham Cambridgeshire as they had gone to the wrong town and could not make it, but a second minibus with some dancers and musicians had come to the right Chippenham. None of them could speak English with the translator missing, but he had dictated a message and details of the dances to him.

We kept low and turned up for the procession in an outfit of metal coloured masks with hood and tunic made from hessian with green and brown forest markings. We said nothing and let our straight man do the talking. Many people took photographs and stared at us, but behind the masks we did not have to make eye contact. Our music was a set of Spanish bagpipes (Gaita) with a sheepskin rug fastened round them, so they looked suitably odd, and a Catalan Gralla Seca which is like a bombarde, also suitable bizarre. A bagpipe player got very interested in the pipes but luckily was called away before he discovered it was a rug with safety pins. A visiting team of Slovakian dancers tried to speak to us in English, we later discovered that some of them spoke Hungarian and wanted to practice. Luckily they were not sure we were the Hungarians and didn't try it out!!!

We finished the parade, lots of photographs and the announcer telling everyone that we had come all the way from Hungary. Later in the afternoon we did a display in the arena before a big crowd. We had invented some fairly easy dances which did not look like the other Morris dances etc. We used Eastern European tunes (not necessarily Hungarian, but close). The straight man announced us and read a speech about celebrating joining the EU with our European cousins. It was very funny if you knew the truth. The audience were very sympathetic about losing the rest of the team in the wrong town.

We did two short, but reasonably authentic looking, dances to the bagpipes and rebec (a type of violin which looked exotic and not English). Then we did a fish slapping dance where we hit each other with foam fishes, danced to a tune used in the play "Larkrise". The chorus goes "Ripe tommy toes for the gentry and a bloater for the likes of you". Anybody who knows Larkrise or Monty Python fish slapping should have guessed by now.

People said it was fantastic. Some were laughing at the fish hitting. The organisers thanked us very much for making the effort to come and dance for them. We didn't say anything, we went off and changed in time for the Chippenham Morris dance spot. It wasn't until the evening that the director congratulated us on the con. He had spoken to us a few minutes earlier and said nothing, then his wife told him. There were still people on the Sunday (and maybe later) who still thought it was a genuine Hungarian team. They came up to us at the Stick and Bucket dance and asked about Hungary.

Thanks to those who knew about it and kept quiet.

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