Background
Parliament Hill Boating Pond – Highgate – London NW5
.... a typical Sunday afternoon during the summer of 1968.
My little wooden boat is stuck in the stinking duck weed again! If only it had managed to avoid the green mass I’d have won the race hands-down. The breeze picks up and rams my boat deeper into the weed. The polythene sail of Ian’s boat billows and it lurches forwards. He hoots with delight and jumps for joy. A minute later it bumps against the far side of the pond to win yet another race. Rats!
With the help of a few well aimed stones and a great deal of prodding with my standard issue six-foot bamboo boating cane I manage to get my boat free of the clinging weed. I scrape the hull clean and glance at the sky. The sun has set already and it is beginning to get dark but there will be enough time to try and win at least one race before the bats come out and start their dive-bombing tricks. We take a brisk walk back around the pond to the starting platform, check the direction of the breeze and launch the boats once more. They bob off into the gloom and we squint to keep them in view. It makes no difference. I leave the boating pond four nil down, but I’ll get my own back next Sunday for sure.
The performance of my boat had been abysmal and even the pint of warm IPA at The Bull and Last does little to raise my spirits. Ian, my alleged flatmate, has now been transformed into a grinning Cheshire cat, gloating over his victories and making matters worse. On our way back to the flat my thoughts turn to sabotage – but how do you sink a lump of badly carved, heavily varnished wood? The only reasonable course of action I can think of is to stamp on the rotten thing just prior to next Sunday’s first race. On the other hand, I could improve the performance of my little boat, but how?
Fantasy takes over from reality and all sorts of solutions to improve the performance of my boat are imagined. For instance, what if it was sailed by a miniature crew? The duck weed and reeds could be negotiated and more races could be won – or at least there would be somebody else to blame for losing. The sailors would have to be tiny though, no more than a quarter-of-an-inch tall (just over half a centimetre) and they would find the big world a frightening place, especially when insects and spiders were out hunting their dinners. So there would need to be warriors on the boats for protection. And what if instead of sailing aimlessly from one side of the boating pond to the other they sailed along a river on an exciting adventure? The river could be lined with different nations, some friendly, others warlike. Warriors could ride war-beetles, fly upon the backs of butterflies and dragonflies, carry out heroic deeds, save damsels in distress. There could be a fork in the river, with a small island – Dwale – the capital of a vast empire straddling each side of the north-south waterway. The other fork of the river could flow east into the unknown, guarded by twin towers at its narrow entrance. The folk of Dwale could be green-skinned – their land could be called the Green Empire. The seeds were sown.
Bozadir , Egrelda, Mergal Ethron and Cowdar the Grey were the first characters created, closely followed by the magic sword, Hufmol, Geric Odwin, Finn Halbard and Nori Effelson. By 1970 the first chapter was drafted. In those days manuscripts were either handwritten or laboriously typed – correcting mistakes and making revisions were a nightmare. Mathematics played a great part – having stuck a piece of paper over the bit to be revised the same number of lines had to be reinstated otherwise the whole thing had to be re-typed. Getting married and raising a daughter, working to keep up with the mortgage payments and the frustrations of revision kept the story on the shelf for many years, though the plot developed in note form and reached its conclusion.
During the mid-eighties the wonders of modern technology blessed us with the green-screened Amstrad PCW 8256. The dust was blown off the story file and it was copied onto the magic machine. Revisions were a doddle and the fact that it took a day to print a chapter was of little consequence. The first draft was completed but returned the shelf when I took up the role of chauffeuring my teenage daughter to and from her circle of friends –in a radius of about ten miles around our house. Her first boyfriend to own a car prompted me to visit the local church and give thanks. Thoughts turned back to the story.
Better PC’s and Windows made the whole writing process a lot easier and another transfer to a better machine was in order. My wife, being of a more practical nature, urged me to try and get Bozadir published. If I was tapping away purely for my own pleasure, she said, my time would be better spent actually completing all the outstanding odd jobs around the house, gardening, decorating, fixing and cleaning the cars, together with other such worthwhile manly pursuits. By this time young Peapod – later to be Greenears - was coming across as the unlikely hero of Bozadir and with thoughts of more pleasurable tapping on his behalf in mind I purchased a copy of The Writers Handbook 2001.
Later that year Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie offered me a contract under their Vanguard Press imprint and Bozadir was published in April 2003 – thirty-five years after my little boat got stuck in the duck weed at Parliament Hill boating pond! I decided to speed things up a bit in order to avoid my wife’s list of worthwhile pursuits and Peapod Greenears and the invasion of the Thrips was published in 2005, also by Pegasus.
Grandchildren have now arrived on the scene and once again time for story writing is limited – though looking after the kids is highly pleasurable. Gesh Dagshi and the Quest of the Holey Snail is three chapters through (Gesh and Dagshi were the first two words uttered by my grandson) and Galadhin almost one chapter.
I still have little boats, though not the originals. My friend Ian now lives in France but on one of his trips here a few years ago we decided to revisit Parliament Hill pond for an afternoon of racing. A pair of fifty-year-old idiots prancing around the edge with long bamboo sticks and little boats attracted more than a few raised eyebrows – the girls ignored us. And guess who won? Well, Bozadir and his crew might well be able to sail the length of East Water, rescue Egrelda, defeat Wasp in battle and return safely – but they still can’t navigate from one side of Parliament Hill boating pond to the other!
Tony Harbourne
2006