Riddley Walker (29 page)

Afterword

Only faint earth-green outlines remain of the fifteenth cen-- tury wall painting, _The Legend of St Eustace_, in the north choir aisle of Canterbury Cathedral. Across the aisle from it is Dr Tristram's reconstruction, in sections, with the printed legend. The story of Eustace moves from the bottom to the top of the vertical composition, the scale of the figures and other elements varying according to their importance and chronology. The central figure and the largest, the one to which the eye is immediately drawn, is that of Eustace standing in a river, praying. His wife has been carried off by pirates and now his two little sons are taken away, one by a lion on the right bank and the other by a wolf on the left bank. Eustace is all alone in the middle of the river, hoping for better times. Seeing him for the first time that day in 1974 I had a strong fellow-feeling.

People ask me how I got from St Eustace to _Riddley Walker_ and all I can say is that it's a matter of being friends with your head. Things come into the mind and wait to hook up with other things; there are places that can heighten your responses, and if you let your head go its own way it might, with luck, make interesting connections. On March 14th, 1974 I got lucky.

It was my first visit to Canterbury; I'd given a talk at the Teachers' Centre the evening before, and next morning my host, Dennis Saunders, County Inspector for English, showed me around the cathedral. I'm writing this in 1998, in the Oprah Winfrey era when millions are bursting to share their most private experiences with other millions; but I find that the Canterbury in me, having worded its way into _Riddley Walker_, wants to stay mostly unworded now. The cathedral is what it is; as soon as we came into the nave I could feel the action of the place, and by the time we reached _The Legend of St Eustace_ I was ready for something to happen. As I stood before the picture there came to me the idea of a desolate England thousands of years after the destruction of civilisation in a nuclear war; people would be living at an Iron Age level of technology and such government as there was would make its policies known through itinerant puppeteers. I know it sounds strange but that's how it was.

Why puppets? Punch and Judy had been in my thoughts ever since reading, some time before coming to England, two _New Yorker_ articles by Edmund Wilson about English puppeteers. I hadn't yet seen a show but soon after my Canterbury visit I saw Percy Press and Percy Press Jr do one in Richmond; after that it was inevitable that Mr Punch would find his way into _Riddley Walker_ sooner or later.

In my first Page One on May 14th there was a Eusa man with puppets but the writing was in standard English. Here are my first paragraphs:

The Eusa man stood outside in the rain and sent his partner in first. The partner was well over six feet tall, had a bow and a quiver of arrows on his back, a big knife, and four rabbits hanging from his belt. He had hands that looked as if they could break anything or squeeze it to death. He poked about with his spear, looked here and there behind things. He seemed to take the place in with all his senses at once, took in the feel of it as an animal would.

The Eusa man stood with his bundle on his back and leant on his stick while the steam came up from his sweating back and the dogs sniffed him. He didn't seem to mind the rain that came down on his little old hat or the mud he stood in.

"Okay," said the partner.

The Eusa man bent down so his bundle would clear the opening and came inside.

"Wotcher?" he said.

That first Page One had domesticated dogs in it but soon these disappeared and in later drafts the only dogs were the killers that Riddley became friendly with. I like those dogs; there needed to be danger outside the fences and they were it--forlorn and murderous, full of lost innocence and the 1st knowing. Activated by the ancient blackened Punch he finds in the mud at Widders Dump, Riddley goes over the fence and joins up with the danger that's waiting for him.

In that first Chapter One the Littl Shynin Man hasn't yet become the Addom--he's Lilla Jesu. From the start the story had a life of its own; the metamorphosis of Lilla Jesu into the Addom showed that it was finding its way.

Early on the language began to slide towards Riddleyspeak; I like to play with sounds, and when alone in the house I often talk in strange accents and nonsense words. The grammatical decline began with the dropping of the auxiliary verb in the present perfect tense; many of the children I went to school with in Pennsylvania spoke that way: "I been there" and "I done that." One thing led to another, and the vernacular I ended up with seems entirely plausible to me; language doesn't stand still, and words often carry long-forgotten meanings. Riddleyspeak is only a breaking down and twisting of standard English, so the reader who sounds out the words and uses a little imagination ought to be able to understand it. Technically it works well with the story because it slows the reader down to Riddley's rate of comprehension.

I did a fair amount of research in Kent while working on the book and the place names came to me without much trouble. In a camper van with my wife and our small sons I explored the Wye valley and the Crundale (Bundel) Downs and visited the towns in Fools Circel 9wys. Horny Boy is Herne Bay; Widders Bel is Whitstable; Father's Ham is Faversham; Bernt Arse is Ashford; Fork Stoan is Folkestone; Do It Over is Dover; Good Shoar is Deal, where I paid a boatman to take me out to the Goodwin Sands; Sams Itch is Sandwich; and of course Cambry is Canterbury. Sometimes special trips were required, as when I rode on the pillion seat of Richard Holt's motorbike to a forest near Canterbury to ascertain whether I could see my hand in front of my face on a moonless night. I couldn't. Frank Streich flew me over the South Downs in his Cessna. I drove to Reculver (Reakys Over) where I saw the Roman wall and the ruin of the Victorian church and listened to the lapping of the sea. Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 maps were my constant companions; nautical charts also. Drop John the Foller Man got his name after I found the part of the Thames Estuary called Knock John.

I had a lot of fun letting words wear themselves down into new words and new meanings. I did this with people's names also; apart from the obvious ones there are Belnot Phist (Nobel physicist) and his father 1 stoan (Einstein) Phist; Straiter Empy would in our time be a morally upright M.P.; Erny Orfing, unlike Pry Mincer Abel Goodparley, who is a capable smoothtalker, is an earnest political orphan. If words aren't working for you they're working against you, so I tried to get as much story action into my words as possible: "I had to voat no kynd of fents" for example, as an expression of no confidence.

After two years I had five hundred pages in which too many people were running around over too much geography; the story wanted to be lean and spare, very concentrated; so I went back to Page One, started over, soldiered on for three and a half more years, and in 1979 on Guy Fawkes Day (auspicious, I thought) _Riddley Walker_ declared itself done and began to let go of me. I was a good speller before I wrote that book; I no longer am but I can live with that.

A final word about my friend with the hooked nose and the hunch: Mr Punch has appeared at my house twice in shows performed by the great Percy Press, now dead, and Percy Press Jr. The look of Punch and the sound of his swazzle* voice, the whole rampant idea of him stayed with me through five and a half years of revisions and rewrites; it is with me still. "He's so old he can't die," Percy told me. "He's a law unto himself." He's certainly a reliable performer, and _Riddley Walker_ would be a poor show without him. [* A device held on the puppeteer's tongue.]

[RiddleyWalker-pic4.jpg]

Notes

I found that I needed to write a lot of notes in order to get my head around Riddley's world. Here are a few of them. I did some drawings of Punch too, for the same reason. I've reprinted the one that worked best for me.

28 May 1974

[_Riddley when he was still thinking and speaking in standard English.]

No rumpa,

No durns,

No zanting

When Eusa comes.

Street Rhyme

They sing it now the same as I did when I was a child, hopping slowly and chalking the pavement: the stag and the cross and the ship, the river, the wolf and the lion and the rest of it. The Garble Time is long past, everything goes by its straight name now but the children still sing it the old way. The straight rhyme is:

No trumpets,

No drums,

No dancing

When Eustace comes.

Rumpa by now has come to mean any kind of vigorous noisemaking. Zanting is not only dancing but running, jumping, fooling and larking about in general. Children are sifters and shapers, the words they keep are mostly useful ones.

30 May 1974

Eusa wants to make and he wants to unmake. He wants to live and he wants to die. He wants to 'win' and he wants to 'lose.' He wants to stay and he wants to go.

Innana's descent

A long time after the devastation the Eustace pictures and the sparse text of the legends are found. In time the name of Jesus stops being used. He is just a man with outstretched arms. The idea of a man being pulled apart develops, and with it the idea of the coming together of what has been pulled apart, the dynamic blending of opposing forces.

Eusa as a space voyager. At the same time of the book people are living at a primitive level. There is in them a collective memory of a time when man could do anything, go to the stars even. Collectively they are like the individual who blots out what is too painful in his memory. Their minds turn away in fear from man's past accomplishments and the disaster that came from them.

The race of man haunted by the thought of what it used to be, ashamed of what they are, afraid of what they were.

The myth:

Eusa works for Mr Devvil. He destroys the world, looks for a new one with his wife and sons. Sees little man pulled apart. He tries to get away on an airship. The Captain says money is no good any more, takes Eusa's wife and leaves Eusa behind.

Eusa wanders with his two sons. The action of the play:

Eusa with Mr Devvil. War and bursting fire.

Eusa leaves Mr Devvil, looks for new place, sees little man pulled apart by dogs, doesn't help him. Little man says, 'My turn now, your turn later.'

3 June 1974

The Connexion Man

Sometimes I just sit and bang my head with my fist. My head is harder than my fist. I _know_ there's more to being human than what we have. I know there was a time when people could think better. I'm a stronger thinker than most of them here. I think in pictures that change faster and I think in words as well, often for long stretches without pictures. A lot of my thoughts are on things that there aren't any pictures for. Most of the people here, most of their thoughts you could draw a picture of. Most of mine you couldn't. I have that. Sometimes that's what I have to do, think of what I _do_ have. Another thing I have more than others, I can think how things would be that haven't been that way yet. Like the overwater thing. The river was too wide, we didn't have anything we could put across it that was long enough. There wasn't any tree that we could cut down that would be long enough. It came into my mind how you could do it with ropes. Two ropes across the river and other short ropes slung between them, hanging down in a belly. Then we laid short pieces of wood tied together all the way across the river in those belly-ropes. Everybody laughed when they saw it, nobody had ever thought of _hanging_ an overwater thing. Everybody said, 'How did it come into your mind?' Well, it just did. I've never looked at any pictures of what was before. Maybe I will sometime.

There was more, there was more, I know there was more. Sometimes you find bits and pieces of things, mostly you throw them away. Bad luck. Pieces of paper with words and pictures that crumble into ash and blow away. Paper, what about that? There's a paper mill in Cambry. I haven't seen it but that's where the rizlas come from. Well, they say you have to have something for trading, you can't always carry everything with you. So they have rizlas and matches and tobacco as the trading things mostly. But how come they know how to make paper and matches? All that kind of thing is bad luck. What was I thinking, yes, the _more_. Starboats, you hear about that. Sometimes someone will draw a picture in the dirt to show what they looked like. The boats we use on the river are made of skins stretched on bent wood frames. People say what if there _were_ starboats, that doesn't mean they were more or better long ago. They were just different. But if you look up at the sky, look at the stars, what a load of cobblers that is. Just different! To think out a boat to go to the stars! To make one, to actually _go_ in it!

There's a _shame_ I feel. Draw a picture of that, hey? We live in huts and holes in the ground and our minds are slow. People know there was more but they're ashamed and they say we're just _different_ from the people long ago. The gulls on the beach, I think a long time ago those were _flying_ birds, not just walking ones like now. I'm sure of it although I don't know how I'm sure. They must feel something like the way I do.

Glossary

_A Short Guide to Riddleyspeak_

As much as possible I tried for more than one meaning in the words. For example, when Riddley says, on page 8, "I wer the loan of my name" he means that he is the lone carrier of his name, living on borrowed time. Life among his people is usually hard and short.

Some words that look strange will explain themselves when sounded out; others may require a little more work. This is a sampling to help the reader.

arga warga: Onomatopoeia suggestive of gobbling-up. axel: "Axel rate" means accelerate.

batcherd: Badger.

Berstin Fyr: Explosives. Note that the Eusa Story is written in an archaic form of the demotic current in Riddley's time. This is because language went through a near-total breakdown in a dark age after the destruction of civilisation.

Blobs: "Blobs your nunkel." This comes from "Bob's your uncle," old slang meaning "Everything is perfect" or "That wraps it up." "Blob" in this case is suggestive of the mutations of the Eusa folk.