The Puppeteer

The time: around 1955, I would have been ten years old. 

The place: Woodville Church of England Junior School. 

The day: irrelevant, but probably Thursday of a balmy Spring afternoon. It always seemed to be Thursday and balmy in those days, with the smell of chalk dust in the air and lazy motes of it drifting in the shafted sunlight through the windows. It’s a wonder we didn’t all come down with silicosis. It always seemed to be springtime then as well, and if it wasn’t there always seemed to be snow on the ground with cream bursting out of the milk bottles stacked against the wall in the playground. I know, because I was the milk monitor for much of the time.

The Class: Mrs. Room’s A Stream, and an arts and crafts lesson. Mrs. Room was one of two sisters teaching at the school and very probably my favourite teacher ever, more like an aproned granny than an authority figure. But then, we didn’t need authority in the A Stream, not like the B Streamers shoved in the back classroom overlooking the outside toilets and the bike sheds. A lot of them would have been from Brookdale Road on the Council Estate, which says a lot. One of them, for instance, was an habitual guest of Her Majesty's Prison system in later years. Brookdale Road was always destined for notoriety. Mrs. Room’s much more formidable sister was in charge of them.

The topic: puppets - glove puppets, the manufacture thereof.  

The process: messy, very messy, involving moulding a clay head to a character of your design and then plastering it with papier mache, later to be slit from the clay with a sharp blade when dried, stitched back together again and then papered over to hide the stitches, painted and attached to a fabric body with needle and thread. 

Nowadays this process would have required a risk assessment in triplicate signed by the teacher and head of year and countersigned by the Headmaster, after approval by the School Governors and the vicar (and possibly the Bishop, if not the General Synod) and even then probably only following an orchestrated demonstration by aggrieved parents at the school gates. 

Back in 1955, Mrs. Room just patiently explained what to do, showed us, bandaged any necessary fingers, and we got on with it, probably half expecting a clip round the ear when we got home for being clumsy and causing the teacher aggravation.

ITV had just aired, the first TV station in the UK to feature commercial breaks, and the programme of choice for the boys lucky enough to be able to watch a grainy, flickering episode on a black and white screen in the corner of the living room at home, was Robin Hood starring the dashing Richard Green. The playground rang with the theme tune. Needless to say, my puppet character of choice was Robin Hood himself.  Richard Green would not have been impressed, let alone grateful for the recognition. The finished product looked more like Quasimodo minus the hump than the handsome hero of the Greenwood, but it was all mine.  

It was hardly going to inspire anyone into puppetry, but it did bring an opportunity my way which, when I think about it, sowed the seeds of a future fascination with the English language and the broader concept of ‘the arts’, for which I am forever grateful to Mrs. Room. 

Obviously impressed by my enthusiasm for the project, she suggested that I might like to take on the role of Punch in a forthcoming production of Punch and Judy for the end of year school concert - the school had their own Punch and Judy booth and full cast. Well, flailing about with a big stick with no comeback from the adults is every young boy’s dream, so I accepted with alacrity if not a little trepidation because I was a bit of a wuss to be honest. And rehearsals were a riot, with everyone throwing themselves into their parts with abandon. Come the big day and everyone was word and action perfect. Except for one thing. The school props didn’t feature a squeaky voice box for its star performer. So, completely off-script, on the night of the performance I hit upon the bright idea of pinching the bridge of my nose throughout, producing a shrill and nasal dialogue to emulate the distinctive intonation of Mr. Punch. 

And it went down a storm, until whoever had sewed Mr. Punch in the props department stitched me up as well. Midway through the Ghost scene, flinging Mr. Punch around the tiny stage, his head became detached and flew off into the audience. Cue gasps of consternation from the production staff, gales of laughter from the audience - and a panic-stricken, if Oscar-worthy improvisation from the headless lead actor, who blundered about the tiny stage looking for its head until Mrs. Room retrieved it from the front row and jammed it back on its rightful place.

That was the first time in my life that I received a standing ovation at curtain call. The second was many, many years later, but that’s another story not entirely unrelated.

Whatever shortcomings that experience might have possessed, thanks to Mrs. Room and other teachers at the school, it kindled an interest in me that was later to burgeon into a fascination for the written word.  Or was that Patricia Ellis? Probably Patricia Ellis, who seemed to inspire most things in my mind at the time, but she was way out of my league. I might have swung it with Janet, her sister, but she was two years my junior and more interested in dolls than boys. But Patricia Ellis was something else.

Anyway, that was a year later in the top class preparing for the 11+ examinations to decide who was going to end up in Grammar School and who was destined to join the denizens of Brookdale Road in the lowly Secondary Modern School. This was at a time when all the girls in the class were actually becoming girls and not playmates in pig-tails and gym-slips, even in those not-so-innocent days of innocence. Needless to say, Patricia Ellis was the doyenne amongst the burgeoning beauties. 

Although the class teacher was Mrs. Simpkins, who used to take us on Nature rambles, English lessons in this top class were taken by the Headmaster to prepare us for the rigours of the upcoming exams. It was here that we were introduced to some of the gems of children’s literature and one of the topics must have been a play, because, still riding high on the notoriety of the Punch performance,  I was suddenly inspired to write a play with a view to performing it at the next upcoming end of term school concert. I got permission to use the classroom for rehearsals at playtime - an unusual concession if I recall correctly because, come break-time, rain, snow or shine, we were all tipped out into the playground to get some air and expend some energy.

The staff would probably have been prosecuted for child cruelty nowadays, but we were a hardy lot back then. I haven’t a clue what the play was about now, but it was probably a farce - Brian Rix and his Whitehall Farces were all the rage then - and obviously, it featured Patricia Ellis as the leading lady. How else was she to come into my orbit? Sadly, it turned out to be more of a tangential trajectory than orbit and she, like most of the other cast, soon lost interest and the play was scuppered before it got out of the rehearsal room. Fickle! All artistes are fickle! Ingrates! The whole steaming lot of them!

So, that was the end of my playwriting career and treading the boards - over before it had even started. 

Except ...

Like I said, Junior school is where I can trace my love of the written word and, although I did little about it during the run-up to G.C.E.s at Grammar school (the then lower school matriculation certificate in the UK), after I left school I dabbled in writing science fiction. Which, to be honest, was a blessed release from the deadly boredom of my chosen career in Local Administration. Although the profession did actually require an affinity with words, there was hardly any creativity involved. 

However, the training at that time did rely on achieving a good level of proficiency at shorthand and touch typing. And for that latter, I will be forever grateful - it has always allowed words to flow effortlessly from my brain to paper with unconscious ability. That is probably the only part of my chosen profession that I did actually enjoy. You could practically hear the neurons shifting into place and firing up the synapses which relayed images from my brain into physical representation on paper through the medium of my fingers. 

Anyway, to get back to writing (which is always a bit of a double-edged sword, as any writer knows, and a strange thing to feel gratitude for) from the age of eleven, I had absorbed all the Sci-Fi pulp magazines and dabbled in writing a few stories for my own amusement. But it wasn’t until I was in my forties that I achieved any success at writing myself mainly because of work commitments. Then, in short order, I started being published in small press and lifestyle magazines, earned a phenomenal amount of money for various iterations of just one story (that was actually voted ‘best on the web’ at one point) had a chap-book of sci-fi stories published, took second place in a national humorous novel-writing contest, followed by first place the next year with publication of the novel, and in the same year had a winning story published in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest, an international affair.

It was that latter success that took me to Florida (as part of the prize) for a week-long writing workshop with the gods of the genre, all expenses paid, and a trip to see a shuttle launch to boot. However, I didn’t trouble the judges in the final assessment. But all the participants were expected to make a speech at the final awards ceremony in a presentation theatre packed to the rafters with past winners, local celebrities and writers whom I and my fellow finalists had revered all our lives. The thing is, they had failed to tell us that this was expected, so we were all feverishly wondering what the hell we were going to say.

Come my turn I have to admit I was bricking it but I managed to get through all the usual platitudes and ‘hurrahs’ culminating in a moment of inspiration. All of our mentors and gods of the science fiction world were sitting in the front row, so I took them in with a sweep of an arm, remarking how honoured we all felt to have been in the presence of so many people who had inspired us all our lives and finishing off with the expansive statement … “but, you know what, guys? Watch out - we’re on your tails!”

The auditorium erupted, led by my fellow competitors who all leapt out of their seats in support. I believe the roof of the theatre is still out in orbit somewhere. Standing ovation number two, and there was no-one pulling the strings that time. It will probably never happen again, but such was the power of Punchinello, even 45 years down the line. Forever grateful, Punch. You’re the man! 

If only Patricia Ellis had been there.