When first you learn to ride a bike, you fall off quite a lot, and the same goes for learning anything quite new, like writing books for children. I had some false starts and made a lot of boo-boos, but in fact I found I was reasonably well equipped. I'd had a good education, at my prep school and at my public school, at both of which I'd studied Latin and Greek, languages that teach you a lot about words. I love words (just as I hate numbers) and had always written a lot of verse, though never before had I attempted a children's story.
I've written well over 100 books now, mostly about animals, and there I had a lot going for me, the boyhood pet keeping (and not only boyhood, I had loads of guinea pigs in my fifties) and of course the twenty years of farming. Also I found, once I'd buckled down to the job, that I had masses of ideas for stories and that I was getting a whole lot of fun writing them.
My first sight of The Fox Busters in a Bristol bookshop excited me no end, and I said to myself that now I was a published children's author, no doubt they would welcome a second book. I set to work on a zoo story, its hero a sparrow named Riff-Raff.
Jo's response to it was lukewarm. “It's not terribly exciting, is it?”
I responded by a rewrite, which I made incredibly bloodthirsty.
“I can't publish this,” she wrote. “It's far too blood-thirsty.”
Undeterred, I produced my first pig story, Daggie Dogfoot.
“This is more like it,” said Jo. “But it's far too long; it's about forty-five thousand words. I don't want more than twenty-five thousand at the most.”
Stupid woman, I thought, losing all those words will ruin the thing. But it didn't of course, it was the making of it, because it tightened the whole book up and kept the pace of it going, and she published it.
The Fox Busters was published in 1978. Then followed Daggie Dogfoot (1980), The Mouse Butcher (1981), and Magnus Powermouse (1982), all written during my time at Farmborough Primary School, which time was soon to come to an end. Teaching children was to give way to writing books for children.
I wasn't ass enough to think I could make a living as a children's author — only the Dahls of this world did that — but Myrle and I worked out (with help from a financial adviser) that it should be possible for me to give up teaching and try my luck as an author.
Chapter 14
A LITTLE TV,
A LOT OF BOOKS
“That'll do,” said Farmer Hogget to his
sheep-pig. “That'll do.”
Now began for me a new full-time career, where I hadn't to go out to work, but simply climb the stairs to my study, get paper and pen, and write and write and write. Yet another piece of luck came along with perfect timing. For, sadly, both my parents died in 1980, and thanks to money that they left me, we were able in 1982 to build an extension onto the cottage that itself had been built, we were told, round about 1635.
For years we'd had to put up with a lean-to bathroom and loo next to the sitting room. Now the plan was to build a new upstairs bathroom on top of a new downstairs dining room, and by great good luck there was just room to make a very small study for me beside the new bathroom. (I'm writing in it today, and I can touch the walls on either side of my chair without straightening my arms.)
I write in all the wrong ways. I don't plan a story out as I should, I just get an idea and blast off into the wild blue yonder, hoping that things will turn out okay and that it will eventually have what all successful stories must have, whether they be for children or adults, namely a Good Beginning, a Good Middle, and a Good End. Usually it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it suits me.
In the mornings I scribble away with a pen on rough paper (in fact I use the back sides of old letters — Granny K-S would approve). The handwriting is awful, there are arrows and crossings out and asterisks and additions in red ink or green: if I died one lunchtime, Myrle wouldn't have a clue what I'd written. Ah, but then in the afternoon I get out my little old portable typewriter and, with the index finger of my right hand, I carefully type out the morning's work.
In the evening, if I've written enough, a chapter, say, I read it to my wife. If she says, “Super,” or “Great,” or some such, that's grand. If she says, “Yes, well, I think it's time I put the Brussels sprouts on” and appears less than impressed by what I've read, I have to begin thinking very seriously. Is this story going wrong? How is it going wrong? Is it just a load of rubbish? Sometimes it is.
The great thing about my very slow method of putting words on paper is that it gives me plenty of time to edit myself as I go along. I don't want to do any more one-fingered typing than I have to.
So now, apart from helping Myrle in the garden (lawn mowing, weeding, etc., leaving the clever stuff to her) and our daily walks with the dogs, I sat in my new study writing away, and the books began to spring up like mushrooms. The Queen's Nose (1983) was my fifth book and Harry's Mad (1984) my seventh, but in between them came book number six, also published in 1983, which, had I known it, was probably to be for me the most successful of all the 100-plus children's books that I've written.
That book was The Sheep-Pig (Babe: The Gallant Pig in the United States), which to my surprise and delight won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction (£250 — I bought an armchair with it, in which I still sit very comfortably). How amazed I would have been at the idea that a dozen years later The Sheep-Pig was to become the film Babe, which had such worldwide success.
The first ten books that I wrote were all published by Victor Gollancz in the UK, but by now I was going at such a rate (seven or eight titles per year) that no single publishing house could hold me: and as well as the hardbacks, everything was coming out in paperback too.
For Walker Books, I wrote a series of stories — six books in all — about a small but very determined little girl called Sophie. Children often ask me who Sophie was based on. The answer is Myrle, even though I hadn't known her until she was fourteen. But in most respects, Sophie was made to resemble her, and Sophie's great friend, her great-great-aunt Alice, was squarely based on my own great-aunt Al.
A large number of my books rely heavily upon anthropomorphism. Big word, eh? Derived from ancient Greek (anthropos — man, morphe — shape), it simply means that someone like me is giving certain human characteristics to what is not human, namely an animal.
Much use has always been made of it in children's literature. One thinks of the authors of some of the classic books — Kipling writing The Jungle Book, Beatrix Potter and her rabbits and squirrels and mice, Kenneth Grahame and The Wind in the Willows. Unlike the last two mentioned, I don't dress my animal characters up in human clothes, but I do make use of the anthropomorphic tradition to give them certain human characteristics that they might not possess in real life, such as courage in the face of adversity, determination in the face of difficulties (Babe routing the sheep-worrying dogs, Flora in The Schoolmouse teaching herself to read).
Above all else, I can give them the power to speak, to use the English language to convey their thoughts, their reactions, their sense of humor, their relationships.
It's a very thin tightrope to walk, is anthropomorphism. I just hope that I, mostly, don't fall off.
Some animals, of course, do talk, and I am reminded of two particular individuals that once belonged to members of my family. The first was an African gray parrot, by the somewhat banal name of Polly, owned by my uncle Alan. Polly only ever said two words of the English language, but he (she?) said them each morning as my uncle came downstairs.
From the cage in the hall Polly would say loudly, “Morning, Al!”
“Good morning, Polly,” would come the answer.
But one morning, greeting came there none. The bird was lying on the floor of the cage, legs in the air, having had some kind of a stroke.
My uncle agonized about what to do. Polly needed to be given a merciful death, but you can't wring the neck of someone who has lived with you for forty years. So, after much thought, Uncle Alan went back upstairs, foun
d an empty shoe box, put the unconscious parrot in it, put the lid back on, put the box out in the middle of the lawn, fetched his shotgun, and shot the shoe box.
The second talker was a green budgerigar belonging to my cousin Helen Bingham. He too was economical in his use of language, for all he ever said was, “My name is Charlie Bingham.”
Once windows and doors were closed, Charlie was allowed to fly free about Helen's living room, a privilege that led to his demise on the day when a visitor brought a nippy little terrier to the house. My cousin managed to rescue the bird from the dog's jaws, and as she cradled his mortally injured form in her hands, he looked up at her and whispered, “My…name…is… Charlie… Bingham,” and died.
When I was in the doldrums, I was lucky enough, as I've said, to have had friends to help me.
Now that at last I was sailing with a fair wind, I was fortunate — and still am — to have my friend Michael as my accountant. He lives opposite to me, just across the lane, so that when I forget to bring him the correct papers or accounts that he needs (for I'm still just as unbusinesslike as I was in the farming days), why, it doesn't take a minute to pop back and fetch them.
There is one more mini-career that came along with my new status as a children's author, and that was on the television. In the early eighties, Anne Wood, now famous as the creator of Teletubbies, was producing a Sunday-morning children's program called Rub-a-Dub-Tub, and she was looking for someone to present a spot on it about animals. She was looking, in fact, for someone who had been a farmer, who had been a teacher, who wrote books for children, and who owned a small photogenic dog. I fitted that bill, along with our wire-haired miniature dachshund — Dodo. Was I interested? I was!
All through our life together Myrle and I have had masses of dogs — German shepherds, Great Danes, terriers, and dachshunds. Of them all, Dodo was the one designed for stardom. She loved the camera, she loved the crew, she knew exactly when they usually came to the cottage (9 A.M. on a Thursday morning), and she'd be waiting by the door, at that time, on that day. Dodo had always been very self-possessed. When we brought her home as a puppy, we put her down on the lawn to be introduced to Daniel, our current Great Dane. He bent his great head towards this tiny creature, and she wagged happily at him.
I was much looking forward to being a presenter on TV (in a very small way, mind you), and I thought, being naturally a bit of a show-off, that I'd be good at the job. But the first time I had to speak to camera, I became completely wooden. Confronted with this metal box, I found it difficult to be natural. Anne came to the rescue.
“Who's your youngest grandchild?” she asked.
“Charlie.”
“Right then. Just imagine that Charlie is inside that metal box. Talk to him as if he were.” And it worked. Gradually — it took time — I learned to perform on TV in a reasonably successful way. At first, in my little slot on Rub-a-Dub-Tub, we concentrated on moo-cows and baa-lambs and piggy-wigs, but gradually, as we made more and more little programs (over fifty in all, I should think), Dodo and I would be filmed with all sorts of creatures, from badger cubs to birds of prey, and to exotic animals, like white tigers and pythons.
Dodo was not happy to have a tiger's huge face (dribbling slightly) only six inches from her own, even if there was a stout wire fence between them. And I was rather relieved to be rid of a python called Eric. Eric was not a huge snake, only about ten feet long, but he weighed very heavy, and after I had worn him round my neck like a scarf for half an hour, I began to get tired and Eric began to get bored and started to squeeze me a bit, so I handed him back to his keeper.
Dodo and I were filmed with dozens of different sorts of animals, including, I'm glad to say, two pigs. Bought specially for the program, they were Gloucester Old Spots, and — because I hadn't room — they lived just across the road in an outhouse of Michael's. After a competition where child viewers were invited to submit names for them, we chose Victoria and Albert, and I'm happy to say they went to a good home once their days of stardom were over.
Then Rub-a-Dub-Tub came to an end, and it looked as though my days as the humblest sort of television presenter were over. But no, Anne had another children's program in the making, for Channel 4, called Pob's Programme.
Pob was a puppet, at whose behest I was given in each episode a clue — such as one would get in a treasure hunt ' and was then expected to find something, a place, a thing, an animal, at the end, assisted once again by a dog, though this time not Dodo. Our treasure hunting entailed climbing steep places and forcing a way through bramble bushes and sloshing about in muddy wallows — none of which would have appealed to Dodo in the slightest but were very popular with my brother Tony's dog, Hattie. Hattie was a black Labrador, and the highlight of her television career was when she was required to run down a bank and take an almighty leap into the River Avon — lovely fun.
Was there to be life on TV for me after Pob? Yes, and once again for Dodo too, because we went to work for Yorkshire TV to make a series for young children called Tumbledown Farm. This was all shot in Yorkshire, at a rare-breeds survival center called Temple Newsam. Incidentally, I was never recognized as we traveled from Bristol to Leeds, but on one journey the ticket collector stopped dead in his tracks, pointed with a wondering finger at my dog, and said, “Ee! If it isn't Dodo!”
There were three “actors” in Tumbledown Farm — me, Dodo, and a small girl called Sally Walsh who was posing as my granddaughter. Each episode comprised three sections. First, there was a set in a big barn where Sally (or “Georgina” as she now was) interacted with a number of brilliantly handled puppets — chickens, a cat, a rat. Then Georgina and I would be filmed going round the live animals of the center — pigs, horses, cattle, poultry. And finally we were filmed sitting by the fire in the bothy — a room kept, many years ago, for the farm servants — where I would tell Georgina a story while Dodo dozed happily before a good fire.
We did two thirteen-part series of Tumbledown Farm, and it was very well received; in fact it won some sort of award. But then suddenly it was all over. The powers that be had expected a viewing audience of four million but got only two million (the figures may not be exact, but you get the point — if you don't reach your target viewing figures, you're out). So ended my brief and very small-scale television career, but I did enjoy it, and so did Dodo.
She's long dead now, as are her daughter, Poppy, and her granddaughter, Little Elsie, and all the many dogs, the dachshunds, the Danes, the terriers, the German shepherds, that Myrle and I have kept over the years. That's the trouble with keeping dogs, isn't it? Like people, they grow old and then they die, but they do it much quicker than people do.
My little career in television may have been over, but the books kept coming and they sold well, and so for the first time in our lives we were comfortably off and didn't have continually to wonder how we were going to pay the bills.
One morning we were out walking with Maggie, the terrier of those days, and two or three dachshunds, and as we came down a field on our way home, Myrle said, “We haven't had a holiday for ages and ages. We can afford a decent one now. We could go abroad.”
“You're not getting me on a bloody aeroplane,” I said. Horrible things, they're always crashing. I'm scared stiff of them.
“We don't have to fly,” she said. “We could go by ship. On a cruise.”
A couple of hours later, I was down at the travel agent's, booking a cruise to the Caribbean.
Over the past ten years we've been on about a dozen cruises, sometimes to the Mediterranean, sometimes to the West Indies. But the one that stands out in memory was the maiden world cruise of the P&O liner Oriana, three months in all, westwards across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, to San Francisco, to New Zealand, to Australia, to Japan (stopping at lots of different islands en route) then, with many more ports of call on our way, through the Suez Canal, and so eventually back to Southampton, where almost our entire family was waiting to give us a surprise
greeting.
The film Babe was now on the screens of the world, and — before we left on the world cruise — the director of the film, an Australian named Chris Noonan, who was on holiday in England, was visiting some old friends in Bristol and came out to see us.
“When you get to Sydney,” he said, “I'll meet you and drive you down to the Southern Highlands of New South Wales and show you the location where the film was shot.”
A couple of months later, as the Oriana neared Sydney, a fax was delivered to our cabin. It said: “Meet you dockside Sydney 11 A.M. Sunday. Chris.”
Ten minutes later, another fax arrived. It said: “Meet you dockside Sydney 11 A.M. Sunday. Bill.”
This was that same Grenadier, now in his eightieth year, who had been my platoon sergeant and saved my life on 12 July 1944 and had immigrated to Australia in the 1970s. Hastily I had to fax him back, asking if we could meet on the Monday evening instead, because on the Sunday Myrle and I were being driven to the Babe location, and on the Monday morning Chris and I were to be interviewed on some TV chat show (it was fun, they had a pen of pigs in the studio).
The location itself was fascinating, chosen precisely because it had rolling countryside (very English-looking) across which they'd built some drystone walls, and because that particular area, which was the site of ancient rain forest, had no (very Australian-looking) gum trees but only hardwoods.
At all events, it wasn't till the Monday evening that I met Bill Grandfield and his wife, Dorothy. Bill was waiting on the quayside, tall, upright, the regimental buttons on his boating jacket blazing with polish, dazzlingly white shirt, Brigade tie, trousers with a knife-edge crease, shoes you could have shaved in. I was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt and deck shoes (“that baggy officer”). Not until we were seated in a nearby pub did I learn that Bill and Dorothy had traveled nine hours by train to meet me.
Chewing the Cud Page 12