A Slip of the Keyboard

by Terry Pratchett

  I recall scrabbling around happily one day after school when the door was abruptly pushed open and in came a man who by the look of his efforts not to look like one was clearly, even to me, a plain-clothes policeman. He pointed angrily at me and demanded of my hostess, who was a dear old soul, “What is he doing in here?”

  Gleefully, she brandished a mint copy of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which I certainly was, and said, “Honni swarky marley ponce, Geoffrey,” which, astonishingly, he didn’t understand but seemingly accepted. And for those of you with little French, it broadly translates as “He who sees any evil in this is a ponce.” Game, set, and match to her, I fancy, and she was a decent soul, a nice friend to this kid that she considered was her only legitimate customer. She never encouraged me to become a patron of the pinker shelves, and nor did she offer me any of the slim envelopes which, when she thought I wasn’t looking, she handed to the serious and somewhat furtive connoisseurs of the dirty raincoat persuasion, who were always embarrassed by my presence. I think at the time I thought they probably contained mint-condition, and therefore expensive, science fiction. (The penny dropped about a year later, when so did other things.…)

  She was a widow and I don’t think I ever knew her name. In a way she was one of my tutors because the growth of the author requires many varieties of compost and I needed that because I wasn’t working at school and school wasn’t working for me.

  It was a decent school, the teachers were the usual bunch (usual at least in those days): some enthusiasts for their subject, some who could inspire, relics of the war, the needlessly sarcastic, and, of course, the madman, the latter a general favourite with every boy in the school.

  My fellow pupils, too, were from Central Casting, most with their eyes firmly on their A levels and a good job, a few who shouldn’t really have been there, the bully, the weird kid, and the troublemaker, which was me.

  It was the worst of times, it was the … no, let’s stick with what we’ve got, it was definitely the worst of times, because I was the troublemaker. Picture the scene: the 1960s were moving sluggishly into High Wycombe and, regrettably, my headmaster considered himself a stalwart against sixties behaviour.

  As a matter of fact, mostly the kids really just wanted to get their qualifications, just as I did. But when I brought in a copy of Mad magazine I was apparently a bad influence. Me! The kid who would spend so much time in the library that he would have to blink before he could get used to daylight again. I was astonished, and I have to say that Mad magazine in those days did some remarkably well-observed parodies of Broadway shows, often with a soupçon of harmless political humour and downright comic book fun, but to the headmaster it appeared to be a harbinger of the breakdown of society and indeed his society was under threat. But I just liked the magazine, and then on another occasion I was caught with a copy of Private Eye, apparently another crime against society. In fact, I was an amiable if somewhat talkative kid who liked reading anything and didn’t even own a Bob Dylan record, making me possibly unique among my peers. In truth, Harry Ward was probably a good teacher, although I don’t think that he was a good headmaster, or at least one who understood that adolescents were going to be, well, adolescents and very few of us were really any kind of a problem. We all carried a knife, a penknife, much better than a pencil sharpener if you had to do, as we did, a lot of technical drawing. I can only recall one occasion when one was actually proffered in a fight, and that was by the weird kid, who left shortly afterwards. But Harry made the classic mistake of the tyrant, seeing rebellion in the most innocent transgression, and transgression in the most innocent activity or none at all. I recall a boy I shall call Charles who had the misfortune to be born with an amiable disposition and a face which automatically composed itself into a cheerful grin. Its only other expression, as I recall, was a mild kind of sullen puzzlement when a cheerful grin got him into trouble. And so the suspicious atmosphere of the school meant that he was seen as either a clown or exhibiting dumb insolence. The influence of Harry got him coming and going.

  As a natural idiot I was also in permanent trouble with the bully, because I preferred to use my voice in an argument and he preferred his fists, but a friend of mine from those days gleefully recalled to me the day when I lost my rag and ran at the kid down the length of the room, hitting him amidships so hard that he went down and cut his head open on an iron fireplace. After that I became apparently invisible to him, there wasn’t any trouble. The schoolboy code was that short of murder you left authority out of it.

  Recently a fellow pupil from those days told me that long after I had left (earlier than expected) he spoke as a sixth-former with the headmaster and learned that the man had been affected by the dreadful scenes he had witnessed during the Second World War, and was sure that this contributed to the man’s itchy trigger finger. I can’t say.

  Knowing now the theatre he had been in, I can sympathize, but how could I have done so then? Besides, I was at worst a clown, and by heavy-handedness the man created what had not been there in the first place. But I thank him in absentia for firming up my decision to quit school before taking my A levels, a previously unthinkable occurrence. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I’d won a prize in a Punch competition, and sold two short stories to science fiction magazines. But being the son of my parents, I researched, and realized that the odds of making a living as a writer were, for practical purposes, zero, whereas a newspaper journalist gets paid every week. Still at school, and lined up for the head librarianship, I wrote to the editor of the local newspaper, the Bucks Free Press, asking if there was likely to be a vacancy in the following year, and he wrote back instantly saying, “I don’t know about next year, but we have a vacancy right now.”

  Thanks to Harry Ward, I went to see him on the following Saturday and on Monday walked to school and handed back all my schoolbooks, and left by the door that could only be used by prefects and visitors, a delightful sensation. The school could be a petty place, and my decision was prompted by the knowledge that Harry was publicly adamant that I could not have the prefectship that traditionally went with being the head librarian. I learned this by nefarious means. I had been spending every Thursday evening tidying up the library and repairing books, and this was an act of malice, sheer malice. Having been a prefect looks good on a CV, and might have come in useful; on the other hand, Arthur Church, editor of the Free Press, gave me the job right there in the interview. In recollection, he said, “I like the cut of your jib, young man.” Did he really say that? It would have been in character. But remember, my subconscious is that of an author and a former journalist, and probably believes that every quote would benefit from a bit of a polish by an expert. As I believe Douglas Adams once said, sometimes after talking about yourself so often you’re not exactly sure how real some things are.

  The conditions of a trainee newspaper reporter in the mid-sixties were somewhere just above slavery; you could live at home and not be beaten with chains. On several occasions I worked every day of the week, including most evenings; and certainly Saturdays, especially in the summer, were seldom my own. There was a mystical beast known as the “day off in lieu.” But it was seldom seen until later in my career. I was an apprentice, a genuine apprentice, my father even had to sign a copy of my indentures, a mediaeval-looking document. Basically, it sold my soul for three years, in return for which you were taught the rudiments, tricks, dirty jokes, suspicious folklore, and clichés of local newspaper journalism. If Johnny Howe was your subeditor, you got all the dirty jokes very quickly, because Johnny was blessed with a wonderfully dirty mind; he needed it, oh yes indeed. A subeditor, on a local newspaper at least, needs a pin-sharp apprehension of every inadvertent double entendre. Did a correspondent once send in a report about a Women’s Institute flower, fruit, and vegetable show that actually included the bit about the naked man streaking through the marquee, “causing disarray among the tarts before he was caught by the gooseberries’? Johnny, the sp
it and image of the late Stubby Kaye, looked me firmly and trustingly in the eye, and almost certainly, I suspect, lied. Any writer needs an eye for the double entendre in the same way that the gamekeeper has to have the mind of a poacher. The deliberate double entendre, on the other hand, is not to be sneezed at; I myself once perpetrated a treble entendre, and I suspect that if sufficient grant money could be made available, the quadruple entendre should not be beyond our grasp.

  Whereas Johnny was short and fat, Ken Burroughs (called Bugsy behind his back), the saturnine news editor, was tall and thin, and when the two of them headed off down to the pub at lunchtime it looked like the number 10 going for a walk. Bugsy taught me to get my copy in on time, check my facts, and never to try to put one over on him. George Topley, Chief Reporter, and the best natural journalist I have ever met, taught me the uses of the truth and some useful secrets about human nature. And finally Arthur Church, local boy, editor of the local paper, who took the affairs of High Wycombe very seriously, taught me honesty and self-respect and not, if at all possible, to offend the Methodists. A decent man, the sixties were puzzling him in the same way as they did my recent headmaster, but the sixties were okay with Arthur provided they included High Wycombe. When the first Apollo mission to the moon sent back those glorious pictures of the earth seen from its satellite, Westminster Press, owners of the paper, got hold of some of these and looked around desperately one Thursday to see which of their papers with colour capability was going to press soonest; and how they must have groaned when they worked out that somebody would have to ring up Arthur Church and tell him to clear the front page and two others at least. Probably, the Chiefs tossed a coin, but us reporters listening at his office door heard his agonized voice as he defended the interests of High Wycombe against those of the universe. And he had a point; every national newspaper next day would carry the pictures of the moon, but only one newspaper would carry the affairs, the important affairs, of High Wycombe, not to mention Marlow, Lacey Green, Loosely Row, West Wycombe, and Speen. It was a Chestertonian moment, and there was no doubt that he was right, but although they were asking, he recognized an order in disguise after a fairly lengthy tussle, and we set to work clearing the decks while he walked about grumbling, very nearly in tears. After all, the moon was just a lump of rock, right? And then suddenly the issue was happily resolved in his mind as he beamed and said with good grace, “Well I suppose the moon shines on High Wycombe just like everywhere else.” We nearly cheered!

  Next day the Bucks Free Press sold out within minutes, even in Speen, and Arthur’s phone was constantly off the hook because local dignitaries were ringing up to congratulate him on his wonderful coup. High Wycombe had approved! He very nearly bought us all a drink, he was so pleased.

  The editors of local newspapers were—and probably still are, insofar as they still exist, many having given way to the useless and suspect local government “information sheets”—often accused of parochialism. But a sense of the parochial is needed for the job. Everybody in the world knows how John F. Kennedy died; somewhat fewer would want to know about the demise of some luckless citizen found dead in his car, in his garage, with a pipe from the exhaust through a partly open window. Murder, probably not, suicide quite likely, but their town or neighbourhood should know the truth and in those days it was conveyed to them by me because I had sat there glumly in the coroner’s court taking down the facts of the matter as deduced by the coroner in reasonably good Pitman’s. We did not like to do it; people find many and varied ways to end their lives abruptly, and all of them are nasty, especially for those who have to deal with the aftermath—because suicide really needs practice, and there lies the problem. Pierrepoint the executioner knew how to hang a man swiftly, and knew how long the rope should be and where on the neck the knot should lie to ensure a merciful end. Most people don’t. And one day, the relative of a particularly gruesome suicide asked the coroner to tell the newspapers not to publish the finding of the inquest. He said, quite correctly, that we were entitled to be there by law, and all would have been well had he not added something on the lines of “although I sympathize with you and sometimes I myself have wished that the press was at the bottom of the sea.”

  Of course, we published that, and Arthur Church, who as I say took local journalism very seriously, wrote an eloquent defence of reporting even the nasty things. The gist of it was this, that it was in the public interest that the truth be known and known because it has been carefully reported and published. Without it, you are relying on the man in the pub, and rumour, possibly malicious rumour. If the local paper does for some reason get it wrong, then this would be known, and an apology and clarification would be made. This was not the best of all worlds, but better than the world of hearsay. Arthur laid this out very carefully and the coroner instantly apologized, handsomely, and honour was satisfied.

  Arthur was a stickler for accuracy, and it was not a good day when some angry citizen came up the stairs on a Saturday to complain about some item, at least not if it truly turned out that the luckless reporter had got something wrong; if on the other hand investigation showed that the reporter was accurate, the aggrieved reader was courteously shown the door. And it wasn’t only coroner’s courts. Along with the other trainee, I travelled on a number of treacherous motorcycles to cover every possible civic event in the area, including the magistrates’ courts, where I learned a lifelong cynicism regarding the processes of the justice system. Regrettably, I also learned that elderly ladies are sometimes inexorably fond of wearing directoire knickers, the tutor in this case being a magistrate, a lady of the shires, who liked to sit with legs apart, possibly without realizing there was no modesty panel. I sometimes wonder now if she was ever puzzled why people never looked directly at her? Indeed, on occasion, it seemed that every man in the courtroom was staring at his shoes, including the lawyers.

  Often I have been contacted by Internet journalists for an interview or some extended comment and the moment they say that they are a journalist I say, “Good, tell me the six defences for defamation of character?” I am slightly cheered these days that some know what I am talking about. I am still quite proud of my Pitman’s and my indenture.

  I was a decent local journalist and well informed and accurate to boot, but when it came to the hurly-burly of the large regional or national newspaper, I just wasn’t in contention, I just didn’t have the killer instinct, as editor Eric Price perceived when he sacked me from the Western Daily Press in Bristol. He was not a happy man if the story as discovered was not the story he wanted, and indeed the Western Daily Press appeared on the CVs of many a young journalist that Eric had hired and fired. On the other hand he was kind enough to say much later that I had been the best writer they had. Possibly that was true because I did have, and hopefully still have, the ability to somehow apprehend a topic and write a coherent, informed, and readable column about it within half an hour, possibly with the help of one telephone call and a newspaper clipping.

  Why am I telling you these disjointed anecdotes? I suppose that it shows how an author is built. Quite a lot of my history found itself scrubbed up, repainted, and part of a book. I am pretty certain, for example, that a keen, clever academic bugger could map the wizards of Unseen University to the staff of High Wycombe Technical High School from the late fifties onwards; not all of them got eaten by dragons. Indeed, some of them, including the head of history who I really liked, have been immortalized in print. In the scenery of my books I see the little village where I grew up. Characters speak who remind me of my grandmother and it seems that the mill fondly grinds up every experience, every encounter, and never, ever switches off. And sometimes I detect the influence of my tutors, even if they didn’t know who they were. Nevertheless, the grinding mill gives something back.

  A few days before I wrote this piece, a friend recounted to me that she had met a brigadier who had discovered the Discworld books in Afghanistan, several in a neat pile. I know about this sort of thing;
quite often a squaddie will make contact saying, “We get told to shift immediately and leave everything inessential,” and regrettably it turns out that reading matter counts as a nonessential. But the brigadier taking cover had picked up one of the books and became hooked, I’m pleased to say. Apparently he said to her, “How does he do it? He hasn’t been a soldier, and Monstrous Regiment was written by somebody with a deep knowledge of the military, stuff you don’t get out of books. So, how does he do it?”

  Well, I think I know, because I believe it is the same little discovery which allowed me to win the Amelia Bloomer Award for Feminist Writing in the USA … twice. I don’t need to explain, because a little thought will bring up the answer.

  For the whole of my life since I was nine years old I have enjoyed words, not necessarily words organized, simply some words all by themselves, such as conundrum and onomatopoeia and susurration, words that somehow seemed to speak back. I care for words and their meanings and sometimes stick up for them in a way that the Blessed Lynne Truss would understand, like screaming at the local news on television “If a policeman ‘said how he saw the suspect,’ then he is either describing the position he took in order to observe, or he was giving a very brief lecture on optics.” The word really wanted was “that.”

  Pedantic? Well I am an academic now. And besides, the argument that such bothering about matters of usage is elitist—a view espoused by Stephen Fry, a man with elite written all over him—is a load of dingo’s kidneys. Wouldn’t you expect a lover of music to wince at a wrong note? Work it out yourself. Words turn us from monkeys into men. We make them, change them, chase them around, eat them, and live by them—they are workhorses, carrying any burden, and their usage is the skill of the author’s trade, hugely versatile. There are times when the wrong word is the right word, and times when words can be manipulated so that silence shouts. Their care, feeding, and indeed breeding is part of the craft of which I am a journeyman.