Fifty Years Ago: Saturday, 31st July 1976
Gosforth — Age 14
No noise today. I adore quiet.
Other people’s noise gets inside my head and makes it impossible to think. Perhaps it began at boarding school, lying awake and listening: footsteps in the passage, a door opening, the sleepwalker wandering, boys snoring or breathing with an asthmatic wheeze. Never tears. Homesick boys were quietly miserable.
I learnt to identify people and events by sound. Yet I liked noises that belonged where they were: wind through trees, water spilling over a weir or lapping against a shore. Even the foghorn off the Northumberland coast sounded like part of the landscape. Human noise was different. It intruded.
I was almost certainly alone in the house, apart from Grandpa coming over that morning. No one in the family smoked—ever—though, ironically, the cleaner who came twice a week did. I had the place and its silence to myself.
I tried to type, but my sister’s cat played with everything within reach. It did not stay long. Mother would not have it.
My typewriter was a black, portable Smith-Corona from the 1960s, bought second-hand and given to me for Christmas when I was thirteen. It had been a curious present. I had wanted an electric guitar and could tell from the shape of the parcel beneath the tree that it was not one. Yet my divorced parents had somehow agreed that a typewriter was what I needed. It came with a book explaining how to type and a promise of lessons from a family friend.
The lessons did not turn me into a typist. I struck the keys as though I were playing jazz, imagining that the noise, rhythm and my natural flair would somehow deliver something interesting to the page.
It did not.
I said I would go cycling. I had ridden the sixteen-mile circuit before and regarded it as necessary exercise. I went down Fencer Hill Park, turned left onto the A1—the Great North Road—and headed towards Wideopen. Then I turned onto Brunton Lane for Dinnington, perhaps intending to continue towards Horton Grange before looping back through Brunswick Village and Hazelrigg, crossing the A1 south of Wideopen and returning through Gosforth Park and Newcastle Racecourse.
Brunton Lane was still rural then. Within another decade, housing estates would spread across much of it. That afternoon, however, the wind was too strong. Cycling became a battle rather than a pleasure, so I turned back.
I went to see Granny V in her bungalow on the edge of Melton Park. Visiting her as a teenager was much the same as visiting her as a boy. Her terrier became so excited that it pissed itself. There was the cabinet of knick-knacks, her music box and the ornamental tree hung with miniature photographs of all seven grandchildren.
The pictures never changed. My siblings and I remained thirteen, eleven, ten and eight; our cousins twelve, eleven and seven. We were becoming teenagers, but on Granny’s tree we stayed children, our faces slowly fading in the sunlight.
She asked what I was doing and how school was going. I do not remember what we discussed. She knitted rather than read: elaborate patterned Guernsey jerseys. I doubt I explained that I wanted to become a writer, or that what attracted me was not fame but independence—being alone, filling the day as I pleased, doing a great deal or nothing at all.
Yet the diary complicated that fantasy. I did not want to sit down at night and discover that I had nothing to record beyond: Stayed in bed. Had a bath. Watched television. The diary forced me out into the day. Freedom was only satisfying if I had something to show for it afterwards.
I had already begun to understand how much could be done in a short period of time, and how daily habits accumulated into knowledge. I did not want to spaff my life away in front of the television, though television remained the easiest way to do exactly that.
Later, I watched The Wild Bunch. There were only three channels—BBC1, BBC2 and ITV—so you watched whatever they offered and flicked between them. Programmes arrived when broadcasters chose, not when you wanted them.
Then I returned to another idea for a book.
The surviving typescript is headed “EXORDIUM”, with “Chance Crisis” beneath it and “3rd Copy” typed in the top-right corner. There were only three versions of this story, though another reached eleven. Decades later I decided that twenty-six versions would have had a satisfying ring to it: one for every letter of the alphabet.
But I did not revise in the proper sense. I rewrote everything from the beginning, reinventing the plot, characters and sentences each time. It was like trying to sculpt with smoke. Nothing stayed still long enough to acquire shape.
“Exordium” came partly from Isaac Asimov. Latin seemed to belong simultaneously to the remote past and the distant future: the dead language of empires, scientists and interstellar civilisation. “Chapter One” sounded ordinary. “Exordium” sounded like history being carved into stone.
The story begins:
“Jonathean Datrix Divininov was born just over a million years ago, to an unmarried mother, who died after his birth. Only a few knew of his crucial existence; if he died he would take with him billions of unborn relations.”
The name is magnificent: Jonathean Datrix Divininov. I had misspelt Jonathan, multiplied the syllables and given him a Russian-sounding surname. I had read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and believed that a long Russian name automatically supplied literary weight.
The hero’s mother dies in childbirth because things happen to orphans. I knew that from Oliver Twist, from Roland and from the Greek myths. Parents inhibited adventure. Remove them and the child becomes available to fate.
Divininov grows into a futurist who anticipates great events, becomes disillusioned with Earth, builds a spaceship and leaves to find a new world. A million years later, the narrator wakes in bed aboard that ship:
“Colours swirled about it in a whirlpool. I closed my eyes and shook myself awake.”
He orders poached eggs on toast from a control box, opens a window onto flickering stars and presses buttons for music and pictures. The screen displays trees and grass. The original spacecraft has become a museum piece. The present ship is the size of a small planet and carries more than sixty million people.
Yet the narrator appears to be alone.
He speaks to Joe, an ever-present digital tutor and guide. Joe is a voice in his head, or perhaps in an earpiece. Every child has one—or every wealthy child does. Joe answers questions, provides instructions, manages the day and remains permanently available.
Reading it now, Joe sounds unnervingly familiar.
Joe is an artificial companion, teacher and invisible authority: patient, knowledgeable and inescapable. He offers the child independence from adults while quietly replacing them. I thought I was inventing futuristic education. I had created something remarkably like an artificial intelligence assistant half a century before I would regularly use one.
The hero eats, looks into a mirror and flexes his muscles. That, too, is recognisable. He is the body-conscious younger teenager searching for evidence of change: an Adam’s apple or not, facial hair—none—bodily hair—scant—and some alteration in the features that might prove childhood was ending.
Then he has a steam shower, collapses onto his bed and falls asleep.
Nothing happens.
Yet something does. Reading it fifty years later, I can see myself everywhere. A boy wakes in an artificial bedroom, isolated from the natural world but able to summon images of trees and grass. He feels imprisoned, tries to control his surroundings through buttons and machinery, becomes exhausted without having done anything, falls asleep and wakes appalled to discover that two weeks have passed.
“I felt sick inside, not because of the abstract effects, but because I hated to think of the time I had lost.”
That is not merely incompetent science fiction. It is a confession.
The ship contains sixty million people, yet the narrator experiences solitude. He has food, entertainment and comfort delivered to him, but no purpose. His life is “basically educational, with plenty of free time,” and therefore intolerably dull. He wants freedom, yet freedom without action becomes another prison.
I thought I was writing about the distant future. I was writing about boarding school, holidays, loneliness, bodily change, lost time and the danger of having nothing to put in the diary.
The plot does eventually begin. Joe tells him he is going out onto the deck and must wear “G-clothes”. Once they are outside, the crisis occurs. Everyone remaining aboard the spaceship is going to die.
The story becomes my Lord of the Flies in space. Only two children survive: a boy and a girl of about thirteen. They crash-land on Terra Nova and must learn to operate the interstellar ship, land it and begin humanity again like Adam and Eve.
I had not read The Blue Lagoon, and the film with Brooke Shields was still four years away. It was not even Romeo and Juliet. There was no tragic feud, passionate language or conscious sexuality. Just two children left alone with the entire human future resting upon their ability to get along.
The fantasy is transparent now. Remove the adults. Remove the teachers. Remove the sixty million passengers. Leave one boy and one girl. Give them the authority to pilot the machine and populate the world.
It is both an adolescent liberation fantasy and an alarming burden. The children are declared more capable than the adults, but they are also condemned to rebuild civilisation. The freedom I imagined always came with a task attached. Even alone on Terra Nova, I could not permit myself simply to do nothing.
I showed some of these stories to my mother, and once to a girl I knew. The response put me in my place. The spelling and grammar were humiliating; the storylines laughable. Exposure turned the private exhilaration of writing into embarrassment.
My mother’s solution was sensible. I needed to read more and write less. She directed me towards short stories: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Daphne du Maurier and even Roald Dahl. These writers understood compression, reversal and consequence. Things happened. A detail introduced on the first page might return with deadly force on the last.
I had atmosphere, machinery, waking, sleeping, meals and mirrors. I had millions of deaths planned and two child survivors prepared to recreate humanity. What I lacked was control. My imagination expanded faster than my ability to shape it.
If only I had possessed the gumption to include Daleks or Cybermen. Monsters would at least have forced the characters out of bed.
Beginning a book was still intoxicating. Every new title page created the possibility that this one might become real. I was not yet imagining strangers reading it. I imagined the writer’s life instead: a room, a typewriter, silence and nobody telling me what to do.
What I had accidentally written was the warning concealed inside that dream.
Being entirely free to fill the day—or not—might produce independence. It might equally produce two lost weeks, an empty diary and a boy lying in bed while the universe ended around him
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