People ask me if I feel naked without my hat. The answer is no. I feel naked without, say, my trousers, but if you walk down the street without wearing a hat, the police take very little interest at all. But, yes … I’ve grown very attached to the hat, over the years.
Aha, people say, it’s like some kind of prop, right? A magic mask? You think you become a real person when you put your hat on? You are the hat, right?
And that just goes to show why people shouldn’t go around saying “Aha” and getting their psychology from bad movies. No, I don’t become a real person with the hat on. I become an unreal person with the hat on. There’s this man who’s sold twenty-five million books and goes on huge and gruelling signing tours and has seen the inside of too many hotel rooms. He’s the one under the hat. It’s tough under there, and sometimes the hat has to come off.
The hat’s an antidisguise, one that you remove in order to be unrecognized. It’s amazing. It works beautifully. Without the hat I can join the huge fraternity of bald men with glasses, and amble around the place without people looking hard at me and saying, “You’re you, aren’t you? Here, could you sign this for my wife? She won’t believe me when I tell her.” It’s not that I mind that stuff, but sometimes a man just wants to go out to buy a tube of glue and some spanners.
Without the hat I can leave home without a pen.
Without the hat, in fact, I can be myself.
A TWIT AND A DREAMER
On school days, scabby knees, first jobs, frankincense, Christmas robots, beloved books, and other off-duty thoughts
THE BIG STORE
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.)
ROUNDHEAD WOOD, FORTY GREEN
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.
A STAR PUPIL
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.