Read Once More With Footnotes for Free Online Page B

bust of Charles Darwin shattered to fragments. "I'm sorry! Please take me back, please — "
     
                  " COME."
     
                  The Devil vanished. Outside, the storm sub sided. Crucible rose, shaken, from the chair. Staggering over to the window, he looked into the fast-clearing evening sky.
     
                  Then out of the sunset came a Hand and Arm of light, raised in salute. Crucible smiled.
     
                  "Don't mention it, Sir. It was a pleasure ." He closed the window.
     

I wrote this for a touring theatrical production of Truckers a few years ago, and it's all true. Even so, I doubt that I could get across the real magic of that first visit to a big store. This was a pre-TV age, at least for anyo ne on a working man's wage. Nothing had prepared me for all that colour and sound, those endless, endless racks of toys, those lights. The visit etched its pictures in my head.
     
    I haven't a clue what's happening with the movie. I never ask. Life's easier t hat way.
     
     
     
     
     
T he B ig S tore
     
                  Truckers started to be written when I was four or five years old.
     
                  My mother took me up to London to do some Christmas shopping. Picture the scene: I lived in a village of maybe twenty houses. We had no electricity and sha red a tap with the house next door. And suddenly there I was in London, before Christmas, in a large department store called Gamages. I can remember it in colours so bright that I'm surprised that the light doesn't shine out of my eats. If I close my eyes I can still hear the rattling sound the canvas clouds made as they were rather unsteadily rolled past the "aeroplane" in the toy department. It was "flying" us kids to see Father Christmas. I can't remember him, of course. It would be like trying to remem b er the face of God.
     
                  Later, drunk with sensory input, I got lost. My frantic mother found me going up and down on the escalators, looking at the coloured lights with my mouth open.
     
                  Nothing much happened for thirty-five years or so, and then I wrote Truc kers: small people in a huge department store that they believe is the whole world. I think my hands on the keyboard were wired directly back t o that five-year-old head. I remember the mystery of everything, and pretty much everything is a mystery at that age. Nothing made sense and everything was amazing.
     
                  That is what it was like for the nomes, trying to find the meaning of the universe in their indoor world without a map. What is "Everything Must Go" telling you? And "Dogs And Pushchairs must be Carried "? In order to understand what they mean, you have to, well, know what they mean. Of course, most of us are brought up by people who help us fill in the gaps, but the nomes have to work it out for themselves, and get it gloriously wrong. They achieve impo s sible things because no one has told them they can't be done.
     
                  Diggers and Wings followed shortly, and completed the trilogy, and by then I was in charge. But the first book was written entirely for the kid on the moving stairs.
     
                  (There are different kid s of fantasies, of course. Six years ago a Russian translator told me how hard it would be to translate the book. I said: surely Russian children don't find it too hard to believe in little people? She said: that's not the problem. The problem is making t h em believe in a store stuffed with merchandise.)
     
                  Cosgrove-Hall did a magnificent stop-motion animation for TV in the early '90s and now, with any luck, it's going to be a full movie feature from Dreamworks. I know some schools have staged it (there's not hing a drama teacher likes more than a script which has parts for everyone in the class). And now it's gone professional, to