The Man Who Invented the Daleks (5 page)

It was that reading, intensified by the experience of the bombing, that did most to shape Nation's future writing. The range was diverse: there was some science fiction, primarily H.G. Wells and Jules Verne; there were detective stories, still dominated by Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes, though augmented in the early 1940s by the sensational arrival of Raymond Chandler; there was horror literature, particularly the great myths of the late Victorians,
Dracula
and
Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde
, as well as the Edwardian ghost stories of M.R. James and W.W. Jacobs; and above all there was a rich vein of adventure stories that reached back to the likes of H. Rider Haggard and G.A. Henty and continued forward to John Buchan and C.S. Forester, as well as a host of their imitators.

This latter was a deep and exciting tradition for a boy in the 1930s and 1940s, celebrating quests to distant, exotic lands, and telling tales of tunnels and treasure maps, jungles and journeys, war and discovery. It had no interest in the bureaucratic administrators of later colonial fiction, looking rather to the glory days of frontier imperialism, when the world still lay spread out for the taking, if one only had the good fortune to be born British, with a streak of derring-do and a taste for pushing oneself to one's limits. Set in a world populated almost exclusively by men, though often with a boy at the centre of the narrative, these novels made it clear that true romance lay in loyalty and honour, rather than in love and women. The spirit of the knight errant was reborn on the African veldt, in the jungles and remote mountains of Asia, and on the high seas.

This was the heritage, the mythology that still loomed large, even though by the time of Nation's own childhood it seemed as though there was precious little left of such pioneering aspirations, particularly in the aftermath of the war that was supposed to end all wars, and that certainly – for a while at least – had ended the fictional romance of war. It was a long way from the heroic death of General Gordon, standing proud in the face of the Mahdi masses in faraway Khartoum, to the anonymous slaughter at Passchendaele, and as society struggled to adjust to that change, it seemed far less amenable to the old breed of hero. John Buchan's novel,
The Island off Sheep
(1936), the last to feature his secret agent Richard Hannay, begins with our hero on a suburban train in southern England, reminiscing about the great days at the turn of the century when ‘the afterglow of Cecil Rhodes's spell still lay on Africa, and men could dream dreams'. As he looks round the compartment at the ‘flabby eupeptic faces' of commuters returning home from the City, he reflects melancholically on the realities of modern Britain: ‘Brains and high ambition had perished, and the world was for the comfortable folk like the man opposite me.'

In due course, a new generation of hero emerged from the pens of Sapper and others. Wealthy young men of action, they mostly operated in the high society of London in the inter-war years, though they were happy enough to step outside society's conventions of behaviour when justice demanded it. Stories featuring some of this new breed – Leslie Charteris's Simon Templar, aka the Saint, and John Creasey's Baron – were later to be adapted for television by Nation, but there always seemed to be a place in his heart for the previous generation, whose attitudes survived in the stories found in the boys' weekly magazines of the 1930s, the likes of
Wizard, Champion
and
Hotspur.
Here the Wild West still loomed larger than the Western Front, and the only acknowledgement of the recent war came in tales not of the trenches, but of the much more glamorous exploits of the Royal Flying Corps (Nation was a big fan of W.E. Johns's books about the air ace Biggles). The core of such magazines were detective stories, tales of exploration, and colourful adventures that featured variants on stock characters such as Tarzan and Robin Hood; there was little that couldn't have been found in the Edwardian era, save for the emergence, towards the end of the 1930s, of some science fiction, primarily concerned with space travel, Martians and death rays.

This adventure tradition, both in novels and magazines, dominated the reading of boys in the 1930s, and Nation's love of it runs through his own writing. Its celebration of the spirit of adventure, of improvised resourcefulness, of the qualities of leadership, were to form the backbone to much of his own work, finding their happiest incarnation in the character of Jimmy Garland in
Survivors
, a joyously triumphant throwback to the world of Buchan. ‘He's acting like a character from a boy's own adventure story,' snorts one of Garland's enemies. Indeed he was, and no one was more aware of it than Nation, whose writing resonated with echoes of this world.

Given his voracious reading (‘I read everything that was available to me'), it wasn't long before Nation was making up his own stories, ‘mostly with me as the hero'. Such a quality was not always appreciated in a society dominated by the very literal values of the church. ‘I was always believed to be a terrible liar,' he said in later life. ‘Nowadays they would say, “He's got a wonderful imagination,” but in those days I was just “that liar”.' On one occasion in school, the class was set the standard writing assignment of ‘What I did on my holidays'. Having done nothing much, he wrote instead a fictional tale of a holiday on a barge. ‘The teacher looked at me and said, “Were you on a barge, Nation?” I said, “No,” and he said, “This is all bloody rubbish then, isn't it?”' The lack of encouragement seems to have done little to dissuade him. A friend, Harry Greene, who met him in 1945, recalls him telling stories that were ‘often stretched beyond what was credible', as when he deliberately set out to scare Elsie White, wife of the verger Bob, with a tale about seeing a ghost through the window of Llandaff Cathedral.

His view of the schooling he received was to be seen in a passage from his original script for ‘The Daleks' (though it was cut from the final version), in which the Doctor berates his companion, Ian Chesterton, for failing to understand the significance of the metal floors in the Dalek city: ‘Chesterton, your total lack of imagination appals me. When I remember that you were a schoolmaster, it makes me glad that you are now here, and can no longer influence the minds of those poor unsuspecting children who were once your pupils.'

Nation's childhood absorption of influences was to change markedly following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's subsequent entry into the war. However remote those events may have appeared, it wasn't long before GIs were arriving in Britain, and with them came a new note in the cultural life of the country. Signs of an interest in American culture had already been apparent when the BBC Forces Programme began to air bought-in comedy shows such as
The Jack Benny Half Hour, The Bob Hope Programme
and
The Charlie McCarthy Show
, but the real breakthrough was the appearance of the American Forces Network (AFN), which started broadcasting from London on 4 July 1943 and was relayed around the country. ‘They did transmissions of all the American shows,' remembered Nation, ‘and I'd hear Bob Hope, Jack Benny and all the big stars of that time. I loved the American sound, the jokes, the
feel.
'

He wasn't the only one to fall under the spell, for a whole generation of future writers was to find its tastes affected. ‘We listened closely to American comedy shows transmitted on the American Forces Network in Europe,' remembered Frank Muir, one of the first new comedy writers to emerge after the war. ‘We had a lot to learn from American radio comedy in those days.' Another of the coming men, Bob Monkhouse, would later talk about ‘our personal pantheon of comedy gods like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny and Phil Silvers', and the Welsh comedian Wyn Calvin similarly recognised the impact made by AFN: ‘Youngsters with an ambition to be amusing were glued to those programmes. It gave them a new comedy, away from the variety programmes.'

The memory of those shows was to remain with Nation all his life, long after their direct influence had evaporated. Well into the late 1980s he was still jokingly claiming to be thirty-nine years old, a running gag in Jack Benny's routines that he had first encountered in his childhood. But even more important was the stationing of large numbers of American troops in Cardiff. ‘Suddenly there they were,' he recalled, ‘with their ice cream, their chocolate and their comic books. Those wonderful American comic books became an influence, too.
Superman
, maybe
Batman
too. They were a great breath of fresh air after the
Dandy
and the
Beano.'
For the first time, the transient images of America that had illuminated the cinemas for the last decade and more were acquiring a tangible, physical presence; now there were holy relics of the promised land that could be handled and taken home, cherished and consumed.

The luxury of those items, the lavish size and quality of the comics in particular, was almost unimaginable to a child living in a country that had by now survived the worst of the Blitz, but was still struggling through on ration books and the occasional foray into the black economy. The publisher D.C. Thomson had begun something of a revolution in British comics in 1937 with the launch of the
Dandy
, followed swiftly by the
Beano
and by
Magic
, all of them cheerier and cheekier than their predecessors, but they faced a major setback with the outbreak of war. Paper in Britain was made primarily from wood pulp shipped from Scandinavia and, with the growing threat of U-boat attacks, such supplies were hard to come by. Newspapers voluntarily reduced their size by around fifty per cent in an attempt to preserve paper stocks, and children's comics were similarly hard hit;
Magic
disappeared entirely, and the
Beano
and
Dandy
switched from weekly to fortnightly publication, alternating with each other, while they too shrank in size. Other titles, popular with boys as well as adults, also went out of existence, including
Detective Weekly
, home of Sexton Blake, and
The Thriller
, which had nurtured gentlemen outlaws of the 1930s like the Saint, the Toff and Norman Conquest. In March 1940, just before the fall of Norway made the position even more precarious, the formal rationing of paper was introduced by the government.

By 1944 book production was at less than half its pre-war level, and educationalists were warning of a serious crisis as textbooks became ever more difficult to obtain. The situation had been exacerbated by the actions of the Luftwaffe, with an estimated 20 million volumes destroyed as a result of the bombing of Britain. Demand for books remained high, partly – it was argued – because of the need for escapism, and partly because the absence of so many goods from the shops meant that people had a higher disposable income than before the war, but there was a desperate shortage of supply. In this context, an American
Superman
comic would fall into the hands of a 13-year-old boy like Terry Nation as though it were manna from heaven. The child psychologist P.M. Pickard campaigned in the 1950s against the influence of the American comics, but even she recognised their appeal: ‘The glossy paper, the brilliant colours and the clear type far outshone anything the war-surrounded children remembered ever seeing.' The contrast between the real experience of Britain and the fantasy imagery of America instilled a fascination with that country that was to dominate the post-war era, for Nation as for so many others.

Paper shortages continued after the end of the war. It wasn't until 1949 that Harold Wilson, then president of the Board of Trade, was able to announce that the rationing of paper was to end, by which time the damage had, for many, already been done.
Strand
magazine, where the likes of Sherlock Holmes and A.J. Raffles had made their first appearances, announced that year that it could no longer afford to continue, though the
Beano
and the
Dandy
had survived and were able to return to weekly publication. In the interim, the departure of the GIs had left a generation bereft, and the publishers of American comics, having discovered that there was a voracious appetite in Britain, responded by flooding the country with imported material, to the immense annoyance of their rationed competitors; in the immediate post-war years, the entire British publishing trade was restricted to around 2,000 tons of paper per month, the same quantity that was being shipped in every year in the form of comics. For Nation, who remained an avid reader of the imports, the gulf between the American and British productions was now even more marked, with a clear age divide having opened up; it was not until 1950 and the launch of the
Eagle
that comic publishers at home recognised that there was a demand to be met not simply among children but among adolescents as well. And by then, although he was fond of the
Eagle
, it was really too late for him.

Nation celebrated his fifteenth birthday on the day that the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, the event that precipitated that country's surrender and finally brought the Second World War to a close. The previous month a General Election had swept out of power the Conservative administration of Winston Churchill and replaced it with a Labour government headed by Clement Attlee. Among its reforms were the creation of the National Health Service, under the guidance of South Wales's most famous politician, Aneurin Bevan, and the nationalisation of the mining industry; on New Year's Day 1947 notices appeared right across the country's coalfields proclaiming: ‘This colliery is now managed by the National Coal Board on behalf of the people.' If that was to prove a little optimistic, it did at least reflect a desire that the hardship of the depression should never be allowed to happen again, and a similar feeling on the part of the five million men and women who had served in the armed forces that their sacrifices should lead to a more just society. When Spike Milligan, serving in the Italian campaign in 1943, believed that his death was imminent, he wrote himself an epitaph: ‘I died for the England I dreamed of, not for the England I know.' Now was the time to build that new country.