Paul Magrs

There’s heavy frost and even some new snow round our way this weekend. J. bought twelve stone oil lamps in the Habitat outlet store yesterday: they look like white apples with fiery leaves set out along the veranda of the chalet/shed/beach hut. We were out there at midnight as the frost took hold. I popped out for a bit between films – I had a triple bill last night – the sublime, the ridiculous and the utterly grim. The grimmest tale was Vincent Price – relatively young and magnificently morose – in ‘The Last Man on Earth’, which I was surprised to find was an italian movie. It’s the very first adaptation of Richard Mattheson’s ‘I am Legend’. Definitely the best, too. Its foreignness really helps that air of unreality. The landcape, the houses, Price’s co-stars – even the coffee cups – seem diffrent, more sophisticated. It’s like watching an arthouse zombie apocalypse. They mess up the storyline about the dog and lose the true pathos of the novel, but the final revelations about cures and antidotes and Price’s character’s status as ‘legend’ is really well done. I can’t believe this is a film I knew nothing about till now.

Then I relished the sublime 1960s ‘Village of the Damned’ – it’s genteel and brutal and unstinting in its horror. It comes to an abrupt halt once the story is told. It’s as clipped as the spoken English of any Fifties starlet. My final movie of the night was the ludicrous ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’, which I’ve always loved.

This time it reminded me of the glow-in-the-dark model kits I used to get as a kid. There was a shop in South Shields called Rippons, and they’d always get the best stuff in. One year – probably 1978 – they stocked a range of Universal monster kits. My Granda’ would assemble them on Saturday nights, painstakingly at the kitchen table. He’d have layers of newspaper out, and all the parts of the kits, and those tiny brushes and paintpots and the tubes of incredibly powerful glue.

I was in the middle of watching George Pal’s film of The Time Machine last night and it came to the bit where it all turns into a proper punch up. There’s a full scale barney going on in the year 800,000 and the Time Traveller’s socking it to the blue-fanged meanies of the Underworld, those awful Morlocks. It struck me then that it was like somebody’s dream about HG Wells’s novel. As if someone had just finished reading that strange and thoughtful book and had dropped off and their subconscious had turned it into something a bit more gung-ho and zippy. The same goes for Pal’s War of the Worlds. The source material has been transformed somehow into something less about surmising and more about running about and thumping people and blowing them up.

Everything seems like a dream – or like stories that kids would make up in the playground. That’s exactly what the Fifties sci-fi films feel like to me – like a bunch of hyperactive kids have got hold of the original stories, and a set of images and ideas to do with aliens and the future and have been set free to tell the stories how they want.

This version of the Time Machine is just lovely, I think. I love this bogus, Hollywoodized London, in which the Time Traveller lives in a cottage with a house keeper somewhere off the King’s Road. His friends are there on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the twentieth century to sample his port and exclaim, ‘Preposterous!’ and ‘Outrageous!’ when he expounds his ideas about travel in the fourth dimension. Funny how, all these years on, and after a whole wealth of tales about time travelling, this story stays fresh. When he unveils his curious invention – all wood, brass, leather and surmounted by a ludicrous wiindmill – we’re egging the Time Traveller on to prove himself right.

I found myself quite touched as he goes forward and learns the fate of his best friend and his friend’s son, who owns the shop which becomes a vast department store, across the road. Strange, too, to see this 1960 film anticipate a nuclear disaster in 1966. Our hindsight fools us into thinking ‘1966′ onscreen guarantees us stock Carnaby Street swinging London imagery. What we get instead are mushroom clouds and the railway bridge exploding and a mountain of rubble dropped on the Time Traveller’s already dusty cottage. It reminded me, shockingly, that this was a 1960 view of future history now: one that had shot straight past the original Edwardian predictions.

The Morlocks and Eloi episode and climax to the film remind me of Star Trek. One of the slightly boring late Sixties episodes in which Kirk falls in love with a dopey woman on a paradisal world and Spock is the only one to realise that something horrible lurks under the ground. There’s a touch of the Thals, too, about the Eloi – the pacifist aliens from Terry Nation’s original Dalek story in 1963. They, like the Eloi, have to be goaded into giving their oppressors a good thumping. Is that what Time Travellers do? Turn up in other eras to overturn regimes and tell pacifists they’ve got it all wrong?

I like the way it ends. It’s a very romantic, wistful ending. He’s off to find his girlfriend in the far-flung future, but who knows? The Time Traveller goes off to explore a new dimension. It’s a bit like the strange finale to the Shinking Man story: their futures are indeterminate, but they have found a whole new set of worlds within worlds to check out.

I’m not sure what the best film version of Wells is, now. Has there been a really good one? One that gets him right? I must admit to a fondness for the adaptations of his works that take liberties with teh material – such as this knockabout film, or the Jeff Wayne album of War of the Worlds – or even ‘Timelash’, which is probably the worst Doctor Who story ever, and the worst ever use of HG Wells’s persona and ideas. But I love it nonetheless.

Well, it was exactly the book I remembered borrowing from Newton Aycliffe library several times in 1979, and it was just as fantastic as I remembered it being.

Last week I mentioned on this blog that a real childhood favourite of mine was a novel in which kids got hold of a magic silver pencil which, when it touched the pages of fictional books or comics, brought the characters to life. Because I remembered neither title nor author I thought I stood no chance whatsoever of finding the book again. But then Nick from ‘A Pile of Leaves’ came up with the exact title I was trying to remember and just a couple of days later a Puffin copy was in my hands, thanks to Amazon’s Used and New Service. (I LOVE that service! Books for 1p! I imagine the system working like some kind of Steampunk internet thing, with all the secondhand bookshops in the world being connected by brass tubes and firing on hydraulic pistons… sending bubblewrapped novels shooting through intricate networks all over the world…)

It’s Puffin’s anniversary this year, isn’t it? Seventy years? They should get their fingers out and reprint some of the ABSOLUTE CLASSICS they have let go out of print. ‘The Captain Hook Affair’ first, I think.

Lizzy is a girl who lives with her mother and grandmother, both ailing and she finds herself, as the book begins, about to be shipped off to a children’s home. The only thing that cheers her is the mysterious silver propeller pencil her grandmother gives her. Once she is is in the confusing, alarming Home it isn’t long before Lizzy discovers the fact that the pencil can take you into fictional worlds. We get some lovely cameos by the Mad Hatter, Merlin, Samuel Whiskers, and the Giant up the Beanstalk. The ‘real world’ that Lizzy has to return to is gritty 1979 vintage: she is surrounded by well-meaning teachers and professionals who fear for her safety. There is a very friendly social worker, Jane Jones who comes to believe in the magic and a crazy psychiatrist, Dr Max Smeethe (who dresses more like a film director than a doctor) – who furiously disbelieves the magic that happens all around him. Even when he is almost eaten by the Giant or baked into a pie by Samuel Whiskers.

Lizzy is accompanied on her adventures by Jack, who is clever and, as things go on, increasingly amoral. When the ruling regime at Riverside House children’s home gets too awful, it’s Jack who elects to fight fire with fire. He summons up the cast of pirates from Peter Pan, and that’s how Captain Hook and his cronies come to take over the whole place. The adults are sent packing in a gloriously anarchic chapter, and all the kids become pirates. Captain Hook goes round swigging incredibly sweet ‘British Sherry-Type Wine’ and smoking two cigars at once, and getting the former head of the school into terrible trouble by making him look like a drinker. It’s all fantastically good fun.

I was really interested to revisit and find darker shades in this fantasy, too. When Jack gets carried away with his ideas of revenge upon the adult world, he turns to science fiction novels and tries to arm himself with weapons of the future. He tells Hook that he wants ‘certain things which could… kill people or paralyse them for as long as we wanted just at the touch of a button…’ It’s a chilling moment. As is the sequence in which the two heroes get banished to the ‘Crooked Land’ of the old nursey rhyme and are put into a grey prisonlike establishment for weeks on end, to be conditioned into accepting the ‘crookedness’ of the world. They slowly start to forget their own world and learn to live with the terrible world that wants them to conform…

The book is a lovely fable about the imagination and freedom. Of course they escape from the world of grey conditioning and come back to a happy ending that seems utterly and completely earned. The book finishes in the grounds of the Children’s Home on a perfect summer’s day – with everyhthing restored not just to order – but better than it ever was before.

I hope Posy Simmonds won’t mind my using one of the illustrations above. There are dozens of wonderful drawings by her, throughout the book. They’re casual, unfussy and perfectly characterful. They, plus Carpenter’s casual, avuncular, slightly fussily old-fashioned tone, makes you long to wield a silver pencil of your own – and vanish into this story more than any other. That’s what it does for me, anyway. Just as it did when I was ten, in 1979.

Oh! Final thing – I had misremembered the book as being set in a brownstone apartment building in New York. At one point Lizzy tells her teacher that she has been to New York, via the magic of the pencil. I wonder if I extrapolated my own story there?

But then yesterday Nick emailed to say maybe I was thinking of a book by Mary Rodgers, who wrote ‘Freaky Friday’? A bit of googling – and I find a book from the Seventies set in a New York apartment building – about kids who find a TV that plays tomorrow’s programmes today. Now, I’m sure I read that. It’s ringing bells madly… So, my NYC novel is on its way…)

I was at a poetry reading the other day and just before all the excitement started I was earwigging on the group sitting in the row behind me. They were obviously a poetry group, who swapped poems and went round attending these do’s together. The woman who seemed to be the leading light was introducing the members of her group to another set of poets she was involved in. They were sitting in the row even further behind. The woman in charge was showing off the only man in her group.

‘Oh, and I should introduce you to my friend Graham, as well. Graham’s dangerously experimental, aren’t you, Graham?’

I peeked round and saw that Graham was looking stricken at this. He was trying to disappear into his coat. ‘Oh, no. I wouldn’t say that.’

She wouldn’t stop. ‘You are, Graham. You’re more experimental than most.’

Everyone was looking at Graham by now.

Oh – pictured: the poster for Tarantula! A curious rewrite of The Island of Doctor Moreau. I found it rather touching: the country doctor courting the laboratory assistant. She’s come out to stay in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, just to work at the side of the famous scientist who’s engaged in solving the world’s anticipated food shortages. His experiments in breeding huge animals (rats, guinea pigs, tarantulas) have awful side effects. Each of his lab assistants end up with a rare disease, turning them into Mr Hydes, one of whom almost suceeds in killing his creator and burning down the lab. And that’s how the giant Tarantula escapes, eventually to wreak havoc in the final reel. But all the spidery shenanigans seem beside the point and, actually, rather easily sorted out.

I was more caught up in the plight of the scientist. The gruff genius who gradually falls foul of the substances he’s developing, turning into a monster and going up in a flash.

Dangerously experimental, indeed.

I’ve had some marvellous parcels, these past few days. Ebay and Amazon Used and New have reunited me with a couple of childhood favourites – both from 1978 (the year of The Key to Time, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, Grease, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, the Battlestar Galactica novelisation…)

After a lovely long night out, Sunday has been about reading. J. has been kitting out the Beach House / Chalet / shed with furniture, lamps, carpet, coffee table, even paintings… and I’ve been polishing off ‘The Waxworks Murder’ by John Dickson Carr. I’d never read one of his mysteries before, and this one came from the depths of my reading pile. It’s a sassy and macabre 1930s mystery, set in the sleazier parts of Paris. As with most crime and thrillers, there’s a soggy middle bit to the souffle for me – when it’s all theories and surmising by the detective and his friends. I’m never so bothered by that. I want more of the tense conversations and set pieces, and more scenes of action and adventure. We get all of that here, anyway, as well, which is great.

I loved the creepiness of all this. Mostly it is set in a gloomy, rather nasty Waxworks Museum, populated almost wholly by effigies of killers and victims. There’s a shambling old bloke and his frosty daughter in charge of the place and it’s not long before we learn about secret keys and mysterious passageways and connections with a high class sex club next door. It’s a club where people wear different coloured masks, signalling their status or desires. Lots of shady goings-on and glamorous depravity… And all the clues are tiny, it turns out. Things I never notice at the time. But I never look at these kinds of books as puzzles to solve. Is that wrong? I just let the whole thing unfold around me and don’t go pushing at the mystery as I go along.

Yesterday we christened our new garden shed / chalet / writing hut / beach house at the bottom of our garden. We took bacon sandwiches and mugs of tea and had them sitting on the veranda. It was a bit muddy out, so Fester the cat didn’t join us. He’s not really bothered about outdoors until the magnolia starts to blossom at the start of May. Until then it’s enough for him to sit on the doorstep, front and back, a couple of minutes each day – sniffing the air with the look of someone tuning into the news headlines. I can’t wait for the weather to clear, so I can sit working in our chalet / shed / beach hut.

Another old sci-fi film last night: ‘The Thing from Another World’. It’s the original Base-Under-Siege-by-Monster movie. Its imagery and ideas are so familiar to us from so many iterations and homages and rip-offs down the years that it’s another film you think you know better than you do. I thought it was wonderful: all the revelations about how this was a sentient and rather brutal vegetable stalking them inside the arctic base. It was unexpectedly horrible – the husky drained of blood in the greenhouse, and the sudden violence of the monster’s attacks, when he breaks down the doors and brings in the swirling snow, smashes the lamps and the coffee mugs.

The characters under siege had a pretty hard time of it – being picked off one by one by this bloodsucking demon… but on the whole they’re a cheery lot. They dash about in a group, sipping coffee and coshing the treacherous scientist on the head when need be. They try things like setting whole rooms on fire with kerosene or electrifying the floor and they seem very pleased with themselves and their wherewithal with malevolent extraterrestrials. I love the scene where they pace out the shape of his spacecraft under the ice and, standing in a perfect circle, realise all together that it’s a saucer. They’ve got an actual flying saucer! And then they blow it up by accident. So again, although there’s paranoia and fright and that marvellously doomy ‘Watch the Skies!!’ ending… there is still here a great sense of delight. Of excitement about being in a great adventure story. Of wary but joyous expectation of doing battle with monsters…

I’m thoroughly enjoying my impromptu 50s sci-fi marathon. I think it all came about because last week I had to rewatch Roger Corman’s superlative, neglected B picture ‘The Wasp Woman.’ I had promised an essay all about it for a book on sf film history that Mark Morris is editing for PS publishing, coming out later this year. That Wasp Woman has sent me off on a little research detour, I think. Let’s see where it takes me.

Probably in reaction to the grey, dismal days of January, everything went a bit Technicolor round here last night. We had a double bill of fifties science fiction movies and it was great fun. I love all that pulsating, vibrant colour from the 1950s. We watched the George Pal ‘War of the Worlds’, which I’ve seen many times before, but not for years. And it made me realise it was this that the Spielberg movie was based on, rather than H G Wells. The scenes in the cellar with the snakey probe and the Martian dashing about are replicated shot by shot. But what a dull and grey film that Spielberg effort was. Just noisy crashing about. He used to have such lovely scripts, didn’t he? ‘Jaws’ and ‘ET’ and ‘Close Encounters’ were so witty and gentle in their scripting – you really believed in those people. What’s happened with Spielberg?