While I am here with you in Dublin I will be talking to young people—that is to say, younger than me—who, at the risk of their souls, wish to write for a living, and they all have a wonderful opportunity to find out that my writing, at least for the first draft, is entirely instinctive as I watch the movie in my head and only during the second draft do I close in on what I mean to say.
That reminds me: many years ago I said publicly that I didn’t really know how I wrote, and would leave discussion of that (and I quote) “to the clever buggers in universities,” and it has since been quoted back to me by your dean of Research, a decent guy, but in my opinion not fat enough for the position, with the observation that I was now one of those clever buggers! Officially! I was astonished, and indeed my whole life has been one of astonishment, as I shall now recount.…
However, there has to be a regrettable caveat. PCA messes with the memory, and also makes it almost impossible to read from a written speech. Doing so means, if the speaker has a hope of holding the audience, that their gaze should flick effortlessly between the painstakingly written text and the audience themselves. I have been robbed of the power to do that. Therefore I shall endeavour to give my speech from memory and assisted by my estimable PA Rob Wilkins, with whom I have agreed that he will occasionally, given that we are all friends here, interject as he sees fit with comments like “You didn’t tell them about the hippopotamus, you daft old fart,” in which case I will have to say, “Thank you for that but please remember next time that it is in fact ‘Prof. Sir Daft Old Fart, OBE, and Blackboard Monitor,’ thank you so very much.”
And why should I subject you to this charade? It is because it is the truth of the world and the world is growing older, and I am luckier, with my technology, than many others.
Twice, when I have spoken out on subjects like Alzheimer’s and assisted dying, helpful Christians have told me that I should try considering my affliction as a gift from God. Now, personally I would have preferred a box of chocolates. Nevertheless, there may be some truth, a curiously convoluted truth, in that because it has made me look at the world, just like my pants, from a new perspective, which, according to G. K. Chesterton, is the role of fantasy anyway. And now I am living in a kind of fantasy, and I have found that growing within me is a steeliness that I never knew was there, the view of the world that might make Bob Dylan look like a man who was only slightly annoyed about the government. Whereas, not so long ago, I used to drift gently through the world, occasionally rebounding softly from the side. I began to open my eyes which led to a terrible tendency to question authority, because authority that cannot be questioned is tyranny and I will not accept any tyranny, even that of heaven.
Nevertheless, to question authority is not, in principle, to attack it, although authority always assumes that this is the case since authority must repeatedly establish its right to rule; and if this is done by force, then it turns out that it was a tyranny all along. Good heavens, I can’t believe I am preaching this to an audience of Irishmen! Just think about it: a quarter of an hour of rational thinking and an Englishman turns into an Irishman.
Recently, an organization not far from where I live had to make some of its employees redundant. They were called in to the office of some functionary who told them that, I quote, “they were being deleted.” This did make the local news, but the most miraculous thing about it is that nobody, after being dealt with by a Dalek, punched the bastard’s lights out and set fire to his desk. I would have stood their bail.
We live in a venal world run largely by men who count numbers and, because they can count people, they think people are numbers. We accept half-truths, we have learned to think that we must do what the government tells us, when in fact the truth of the matter is that the government should do what we tell it. Governments are scared. In England, unlike Ireland, where I gather you punch one another’s lights out for fun and entertainment at both weddings and funerals, the government does not like to hold a referendum, because that would mean that stupid people, which is to say people who aren’t politicians, would make the decisions which are better left to stupid and, as we learn more and more, dishonest politicians instead. They despise us until an election comes around, when they pretend that they do not.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, three peoples who hold dear to them the same God are at one another’s throats. How stupid can one species be? And we will continue to be so stupid until we realize that the Iron Age is over. I write fantasy and I wouldn’t have been able to come up with something like that.
It may not surprise you to know that I have some Irishness in my ancestry, but I suspect that everybody has, in the same way that we’re all related to Charlemagne.
My mother, sadly no longer with us, had an Irish grandfather who told her stories as a girl and took delight in telling me how she passed them on to me when I was very young. I was too young to remember, but I sometimes suspect that many of those have lurked in the nether regions of my subconscious, waiting to burst out as soon as, to the dismay of the gods of literature, I got my hands on my first word processor. I am pretty certain that one of them surfaced in Lords and Ladies, because it has an indefinable Irish construction.
I owe a great deal to my parents. My mother watched me become a Knight, but do you know, she would have been even prouder to talk about “my son, the professor.” They raised me with kindness and, where appropriate, a side order of brief and effective sternness and—may they be forever blessed for this final consideration—without any religious upbringing whatsoever. To the best of my knowledge, neither of my parents as an adult ever went in to church with religious aforethought. I know that there was distant Catholicism in my mother’s family, but only because once, when I was about six years old, I found a crucifix and, much to her amusement, came up to her holding it and said, “Mum, I have found a stick with an acrobat on it!” And although she did indeed never perform an act of worship that I was aware of, the acrobat followed her every house move and after her death I desperately tore my way through her possessions until I found him. He was actually in front of me as I wrote this lecture. I have always considered him an exemplar of mankind, but possibly regrettably the Origin of Species hit me before the Bible did.
As a child, I did not read for pleasure. Reading was associated with school and besides, I was always one step behind. A trait that has characterized my life, I feel. Starting with the fact that I was born late! It came as a shock, I can tell you, but not to my mother who had been lying there waiting for me for several hours after the apparently predestined time, or three damn hours as she put it to me sometime later.
A few years on, when school days beckoned, the family was still on holiday and I missed my first day. And the First Day, as everybody knows, is the important day. That’s when you make your friends and enemies and, more importantly, get your peg on which your raincoat will hang for the next three or four years. I might have got the tank! I could have been a contender for the soldier! I wouldn’t have even minded the smiley sun and would have been happy with the purple dog but, no, not me, I was left with the two damn cherries. And so I lagged, but you couldn’t lag very much with my mum who taught me to read with love, care, and affection—and when that didn’t work, bribery, at a penny per page read perfectly, which subsequently turned out to be a very wise investment on her part, especially much later when they moved into their new house in quite a posh and sought-after location.…
However, she made the mistake of educating me above my age. I recall, because it is in fact tattooed on my psyche, the day in the third or fourth form when the teacher asked us where the rain came from. It so happened that my mum had told me about the water cycle and how the seas evaporate gently into the sky and form clouds which are then blown over the land, get cooled down, and fall as rain. Of course, all the smart kids, the ones with the pegs not marked by soft fruit, had their hands up and were making “me, miss, me, miss” noises, but the teacher’s eye lit upon the silly kid, who
was the one raising his hand higher than any other child. And upon her surprised nod I triumphantly shouted out, “the sea, miss!”
The result? The jeering of the class, egged on by the teacher, who hadn’t even bothered to ask me why I said so. Even as a bewildered kid I was thinking in some kind of terrified puzzlement, “Well, surely she can’t believe that I don’t know that it falls out of the sky, but she asked where it came from and I told her the truth.” There is a circle of hell for teachers like that, and it’s right next to the one set aside for teachers who don’t like parents to teach their children to read before they go to school and one furnace away from people who believe that children should only be given books that are suitable for them, and I tell you what, it isn’t big enough or indeed low enough. I didn’t tell my mother, of course, because you never told your mother, just in case it got you into more trouble, but something began to seethe and grow, I’m sure of it. But still I pressed on. In my school, staff made the decision when you were six, based on your facility with reading, as to whether or not you would pass the old eleven-plus examination, the winners of which would go on to various grammar schools while the losers went to what were called the secondary moderns, where there was a wailing and gnashing of teeth, especially yours.
And because, despite my mother’s efforts to teach me to read at all, I didn’t pass that staff test, I was put among the goats rather than the sheep and that was the best thing that ever happened in my education, because I was a bright kid, even if a somewhat weird one, and with all the sheep pastured with the teacher who would get them through the examination I, the kid who was always halfway up the class, could suddenly become top with barely an effort. And as you know, when you’re on top you want to stay on top, oh my, indeed you do. And so, for the first time, I really worked hard.
Around that time, while I was up in London with my parents an uncle gave me a copy of The Wind in the Willows, and I exploded. I’d never heard of books like this. Books were things that the teachers read to you out of, but here was this mole, who had a friend who was a rat, who had a friend who was a badger, and they all had a friend who was a toad, and not just any toad because this toad could drive a car and be mistaken for a washerwoman! And even I was pretty certain that while a washerwoman probably was not a contender for the Miss World contest she was unlikely to be mistaken for a toad.
I couldn’t have expressed my feelings at that point, because I didn’t have the language for it but now I would say that I realized with huge delight that the author was doing a number on us, messing with our minds, twisting the world! Where the hell can I get some more? I thought.
Incidentally, I remembered while writing this, that at the time I was concerned about the horse. Remember? The horse that pulled the canary-coloured caravan in the book? I recalled thinking as a child that all these animals can speak and don’t have to go to work for a living, like my dad, whereas the carthorse does all the work, all the time, and doesn’t have a voice. The momentary feeling I had then was pure socialism. And that is how I became a Saturday boy at the local public library, feverishly writing out another library ticket to myself every time there was a book I really wanted to read. And I read everything.
There was a sort of chain reaction: one book sends you on to another, and I read it, and went on to the next, without order, method, or any plan, except possibly to read them all, and so I was reading Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor at the same time as I was reading Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books and reading both these books in the same, as it were, mental tone of voice.
Some stuff I thought was rubbish, and probably was, but patterns emerged; taking down a book on the Silk Road, simply because it sounded interesting, channelled me on to the history that we didn’t learn at school, not because the teachers were bad but because nobody had really thought about what education should be. I remember learning in school about the Corn Laws, but only vaguely remember what they were; but I do remember that they were a government cock-up to the detriment of the poor. So, no change there then! But the real history—the history that everyone should know—the beginnings of the earth, the dance of the continents, the journeys of mankind, the developments of science—these took little space on the curriculum, but thankfully were in abundance in the library, God bless it.
For me, my education in the library was like putting together a great big jigsaw puzzle of science fiction, history, and palaeontology. I read up on them as if they were all part of the same thing which, in a holistic kind of way, they certainly were.
Another breakthrough came when I discovered secondhand bookshops round about the age of twelve; here were the books that no longer turned up on the library shelves, my local library in Beaconsfield being a spanking new library with spanking new books. But my dad told me there was a secondhand bookshop in the village of Penn, a short cycle ride away, although a difficult cycle ride when you’re coming back with two full, creaking carrier bags of books hanging off the handlebars. It was a wonderful bookshop, it was where I learned humour.
I did this the easy way, although the easy way is often not at all easy. I read for pleasure every bound copy of the magazine Punch between 1840 and the mid 1960s. Why? Well, not to get a master class in humorous writing, but for fun. However a master class was what I got because I read the best satirists and comic writers of a whole century, including Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome, whose laconic styles, it seemed to me, bore a similarity even though they were an ocean apart. Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle delighted me by producing the Molesworth series. Surely you know? The very best schoolboy humour in the books Down with Skool!, Whizz for Atomms, How to be Topp, and Back in the Jug Agane. Then I began to absorb the columnists like Beachcomber, Patrick Campbell, Robert Robinson, and not least, certainly not least, Alan Coren—possibly, as far as observational humour is concerned, the king of them all.
I read all of these when I was, by the standards of the late fifties, still a child, but in doing so for sheer pleasure, I was pressing my foot hard down on the growing up button; I found humour has to be topical and so while reading those musty tomes of Punch I picked up, by osmosis, the topics, concerns, and even the speech patterns of the millennia, which is money in the bank for a writer. I wasn’t looking for ideas, techniques, or, that terrible word, tips, I simply absorbed. Writers probably all do this in their separate ways, because it is hard to imagine an author who was not a reader first. I was astonished at the wealth laid out for me. I was learning from the masters and I thought about what I learned. In fact, I did not know it at the time, but a Satanic mill had started turning in my head and eventually it would turn out a writer, but like every mill, it needed grist. (And if you don’t know what grist is, look it up! You’re supposed to be academics!)
I was particularly impressed by Alan Coren’s grasp of the vocabulary of the average bewildered Englishman, but especially of what we used to call the working class. I know this because my London granny used to take me around the street markets and every single barker, shill, trader, hard bargainer, bus conductor, and even my grandmother had a dialogue by Coren. A wonderful man.
I remember having a cheerful argument with my mum after my London granny told me that you could tell where a bus was going to because its name was on the front. My mother had taught me about the Greek myths and had mentioned the first marathon, run by Pheidippides—he ran from Marathon to Athens, as every schoolboy knows, well, used to—and I remember discussing with Mum the valid point that since he was running to Athens he was really running an Athens rather than a Marathon because, quite certainly, this would have been the case had he been employed by London Transport. A point which my mother graciously took without giving me a clip around the ear.
In accordance with the Satanic mills, to make certain that I was constantly being surprised, the calendar that my mother and father, both working people, had to follow for their summer holidays meant that I also arrived at my secondary school, yes, one day late. And that’s th
e day, if you remember and have been paying attention, they tell you everything important. It’s no good coming in on the second day, because the second day is not the first day, and of course that’s the day you learn the things you learn on the second day and once again the feeling I had that “everybody knows something that I don’t” reinforced my air, if air can be reinforced, of astonishment.
Obviously on that first day the secret of algebra had been disseminated. Later on I would dream that I might understand algebra and have mastery of the world, but ten years ago my friend Ian Stewart, professor of mathematics at Warwick, sat down with me after a university dinner and scrawled all over the napkins the sheer and obvious understandability of the basics of the quadratic equation, with sweat beading on his brow, to which I sadly reacted with the philosophical equivalent of the word duur. (I had to teach my speech engine to understand the word duur, you know, yes, I had to teach a computer to be dumb. A project for a rainy afternoon.)
And so, once again I settled down to being halfway down the class, doing enough schoolwork to survive, and no more. My true education was still coming via the library, and amazingly from the science fiction books I was consuming like sweets. Bliss it was in that space-age dawn to be alive, but unfortunately my only reliable source of first-class secondhand American science fiction magazines was called the Little Library, and it was in a shack in Frogmoor, a tiny part of High Wycombe, in which a very nice elderly lady dispensed cheer, the occasional cup of tea, and pornography. However, in order to justify the name and presumably to have some wares that she could put in the window, she also sold decent SF and fantasy from secondhand cardboard boxes, below, how shall I put it, the pinker shelves, which were not at that time of particular attraction to me. How could you turn your eyes upwards when there was a Brian Aldiss that you hadn’t read yet, and something by Harry Harrison, and the third book in James Blish’s Cities in Flight trilogy? I consumed, and became such a habitué that I was guaranteed a cup of tea twice every week, after which I would leave with my satchel bulging, possibly to the bewilderment of any regular bystander, who might have been unaware of the SF booty I called my own.
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