Read A Slip of the Keyboard Online
Authors: Terry Pratchett
A Slip of the Keyboard (21 page)
Without the hat, in fact, I can be myself.
WIT AND A
D
REAMER
On school days, scabby knees, first jobs, frankincense, Christmas robots, beloved books, and other off-duty thoughts
HE
B
IG
S
TORE
Programme for Bob Eaton’s stage adaptation of
Truckers
,
March 2002
It’s all true. Even so, I doubt that I could get across the real magic of that first visit to a big store. This was a pre-TV age, at least for anyone on a working man’s wage. Nothing had prepared me for all that colour and sound, those endless, endless racks of toys, those lights. The visit etched its pictures in my head
.
Truckers
started to be written when I was four or five years old.
My mother took me up to London to do some Christmas shopping. Picture the scene: I lived in a village of maybe twenty houses. We had no electricity and shared a tap with the house next door. And suddenly there I was in London, before Christmas, in a large department store called Gamages. I can remember it in colours so bright that I’m surprised that the light doesn’t shine out of my ears. If I close my eyes I can still hear the rattling sound the canvas clouds made as they were rather unsteadily rolled past
the “aeroplane” in the toy department. It was “flying” us kids to see Father Christmas. I can’t remember him, of course. It would be like trying to remember the face of God.
Later, drunk with sensory input, I got lost. My frantic mother found me going up and down on the escalators, looking at the coloured lights with my mouth open.
Nothing much happened for thirty-five years or so, and then I wrote
Truckers
: small people in a huge department store that they believe is the whole world. I think my hands on the keyboard were wired directly back to that five-year-old head. I remember the mystery of everything, and pretty much everything is a mystery at that age. Nothing made sense and everything was amazing.
That is what it was like for the nomes, trying to find the meaning of the universe in their indoor world without a map. What is “Everything Must Go” telling you? And “Dogs and Pushchairs must be Carried’? In order to understand what they mean, you have to, well, know what they mean. Of course, most of us are brought up by people who help us fill in the gaps, but the nomes have to work it out for themselves, and get it gloriously wrong. They achieve impossible things because no one has told them they can’t be done.
Diggers
and
Wings
followed shortly, and completed the trilogy, and by then I was in charge. But the first book was written entirely for the kid on the moving stairs.
(There are different kinds of fantasies, of course. Six years ago a Russian translator told me how hard it would be to translate the book. I said: surely Russian children don’t find it too hard to believe in little people? She said: that’s not the problem. The problem is making them believe in a store stuffed with merchandise.)
OUNDHEAD
W
OOD
, F
ORTY
G
REEN
Playground Memories, Childhood Memories Chosen by the Famous in Support of Elangeni Middle School and Chestnut Lane Lower School, Amersham
,
ed. Nick Gammage, 1996
Forty Green is near High Wycombe, in the Chilterns. I lived there when I was at primary school, and it was there that I learned how to spit, how to live with scabby knees, and how to run away. My parents were wonderful—they were parents who wouldn’t mind taking you out of school for the day to go to Lyme Regis in search of fossils. Once we went to a place called Church Cliff, and my dad brought a bucket—you could pick up winkles. We put lots of winkles in the back of the car—it didn’t fall over, which was good, and when we got home, we gave some to all the neighbours. I got to enjoy being a boy, living in Forty Green
.
My favourite play area was—it still
is
—called Roundhead Wood, although it has fewer trees and more barbed wire now. And here four or five of us roared around like some screaming multilegged animal, building camps, climbing trees, riding bikes around the
little chalk pit in the middle, and growing up a little bit more every day. It stood for every woodland, every jungle, and, eventually, the surface of alien worlds. And you could hear your mum if she called.
One game involved climbing up a young beech tree, standing on a fork in the branches, and leaping across to another smooth-trunked tree about five feet away. The important thing was to hit the tree full on and instantly wrap your arms around it, otherwise you dropped into the holly bushes ten feet below. And then, having successfully adhered to the tree, you slid down, getting your trousers all green. There would be this solemn procession of kids … scramble LEAP splat slitherslither. Or LEAP grab panic ARGGGGHHH.
Of course, we had to make our own entertainment in those days.
TAR
P
UPIL
From
Celebrating 60 Years: Holtspur School 1951–2011
,
2011
I didn’t enjoy primary school. I was the boy who came late. Not one of the real dunces, but more goat than sheep. H. W. Tame, the master, apparently believed he could divine in a six-year-old which secondary school that boy or girl would go on to—and since I was a goat, he had me down as one of the losers. My mum wasn’t going to have any of that, so she did what a lot of mums do—found a teacher locally who could help me
.
I remember the day of the eleven-plus results when H. W. Tame went around the classroom to tell us where we were going. There was silence as I got out of my chair to go and tell my parents, who were waiting outside. I was the only goat that passed
.
There was a book about H. W. Tame called
Selected at Six,
but if my mother had been a teacher, she would have been head of something
.
Of course I remember my first headmaster, H. W. Tame, a giant of a man, about six hundred miles high as I recall. He was a pioneer of
sex education for older primary school children, and I remember when I was about eleven going home from his talk, which we had all been looking forward to with considerable trepidation and excitement. I walked through the autumn leaves kicking them into the air and in my head weighing up the likelihoods and possibilities and deciding to my own satisfaction that he had definitely got it wrong.
In all truth, I cannot say that my memories of Holtspur School were of the warmest, but possibly that was entirely because I was an absolutely quintessential example of a twit and dreamer. Fortuitously I survived, and the talent of dreaming I subsequently found, when under control, to be remarkably rewarding. That which does not kill us makes us strong. Seriously, it was, well, school, decent enough in its way, and later, depending on your mood at the time, you decide which spectacles to wear when recalling your thoughts.
I also remember the pantomimes, which H. W. Tame wrote and occasionally appeared in, especially if a giant was wanted. Some time later on, as an adult, I met him at an event and was amazed at the miracle that meant he was now about the same size as me. It was school and if you managed to come out the other side in a reasonably amiable state of mind that must have been a plus.
N
G
RANNY
P
RATCHETT
“False Teeth and a Smoking Mermaid”: Famous People Reveal the Strange and Beautiful Truth About Themselves and Their Grandparents
,
2004
Granny Pratchett was very small, very intelligent, badly educated, and rolled her own cigarettes. She carefully dismantled the dog-ends and kept them in an old tobacco tin from which she rolled future fags, occasionally topping it up with fresh tobacco. As a child this fascinated me, because you didn’t need to be a mathematician to see that this meant there must have been some shreds of tobacco she’d been smoking for decades, if not longer.
She spoke French, having gone off to be a ladies’ maid in France before the First World War. She met Granddad Pratchett by chance, having taken part while she was there in a kind of pen-pal scheme for lonely Tommies at the Front. I suppose it was a happy marriage—when you’re a kid, grandparents just
are
. But I suspect it would have been a happier one for her if she’d married a man who enjoyed books, because they were her secret vice. She had one treasured
shelf of them, all classics, but when I was around twelve I used to loan her my science fiction books, which she read avidly.
Or so she said. You could never be quite sure with Granny. She was one of the brightest people I’ve met. In another time, with a different background, she would have run companies.