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.
ON GRANNY PRATCHETT
“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.
TALES OF WONDER AND OF PORN
Noreascon Four: WorldCon programme book, 2004
The things we love when we’re young stay with us—like astronomy, for me. The day I found out I had PCA, I’d just got a nice new piece for my telescope. And PCA has a lot to do with the eyes—you see, but sometimes you don’t see because the brain is having difficulties processing the signal from the eyes. It’s something I can deal with, but I can’t read small type very easily. And as for the telescope … well, hanging around with a beer while Rob operates it is still good.
Still, I don’t feel hard done by. I’ve read, oh lordy how I’ve read—I have books stashed everywhere. Those comic books that started everything for me were mostly rather cheapo, but some of them survive to the present day and can still be found somewhere in one of my libraries.
Well, well, well …
My first WorldCon was in 1965. It was in London, of course. Only Americans and very rich people (the terms were considered interchangeable) flew the wide Atlantic in those days. Brian Aldiss was the GoH, and Arthur C. Clarke spoke at the banquet, illustrating his uplifting talk by flourishing a nail from the Mayflower and a piece of the heat shield of, I think, Friendship 7.
Over breakfast, James Blish complained to me about the lack of waffles. I was so proud! The author of the Cities in Flight trilogy had chosen me in whom to confide his displeasure at the narrow choice of British breakfast products!
There were giants in the world in those days or, at least, people who were very considerably taller than me.
But that was later.
I think it all started with a Superman comic that another kid gave to me when I was on holiday. I must have been nine. By the end of the holiday I was wearing my red towel tied round my neck all the time. For what it’s worth, I always preferred Batman. Most local kids did. If you ate up your broccoli and drank your milk you could theoretically be Batman when you grew up, whereas in order to be Superman you had to be born on another planet. My friend Nibbsy, who was a Superman fan, reckoned you could be a kind of Superman if this planet blew up and your dad had the foresight to build a space rocket for you ahead of time. He thought I was in with a chance because my dad could weld. I feared his theory was unsound.
There were fights at school over the question of whether or not Batman could fly. Those of us who said he couldn’t were in the minority and, therefore, got beaten up by the thick kids. But, hahaha, it wasn’t us who broke limbs by jumping out of their bedroom windows. Shouting “Batmaaagh!” on the way down didn’t work, did it …
But the undercurrents were stirring. Gotham City had altogether too many carnival floats and too many dumb plots even for a nine-year-old. At about this time, Brooke Bond Tea started bringing out collectable cards in every packet of tea—more particularly, a series called Out Into Space.
I have them here, now, as I type. Never mind Proust and his biscuit, my ticket to the past is card nine, “Planets and Their Moons.”
The colours are garish, the paintings are not great, but my family drank tea until their eyeballs floated just so I could get ’em all. Memorize the back of every card and you’d know more than most people today know about the night sky. Admittedly, some of what you’d know would be wrong: Mars was shown with canals. But they got me hooked on space, which is a great addiction because there’s lots of it and it’s obtainable free. And that was great, because they’d just decided to start the Space Age.