Fantasy Places

 As far back as I can remember I had daydreams of fantasy worlds.   Even as a pre-schooler whilst listening to wartime broadcasting with my mother, still at the stage where I thought little people lived inside what we called The Wireless, I believed they went about the prime purpose of their lives after the programme finished and wondered what it would be like to join them.   Their names still linger within the furthest corners of memory, Alvar Lidell and John Snagge undoubtedly classy and elegant.  They presented important items of news and were given greatest attention by most of the adults in families like ours.  I had them going home to tiny houses very similar to those on The Overcliff at Gravesend.   Lord Haw Haw who I later learned was really called William Joyce who we hated and so jeered back at him whenever we heard his voice was forced by me to live rough under the railway bridge at Waterdales.   And Wilfred Pickles who wasn’t in any way stylish or grand but down to earth and with a funny accent that we certainly did not ridicule him for because he was largely one of us.  I gave him a cosy weatherboard cottage near the Three Daws.  

It was years before I abandoned the idea of these extraordinarily tiny people having lives on a different stratosphere and despite their size differential,  bearing strong similarities to Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput, a literary fantasy I encountered years later via Mr Will Clarke our inspirational teacher at St Botolph’s School.   Though certainly on a grander scale than Wirelessland Swift’s precise descriptions were delightfully reassuring that such places truly existed.   Why should Planet Earth be the only cosmos in any case?   Horses a mere four inches high, ridden by six inch tall Lilliputians many living and working in a beautifully described capital city called Mildendo seemed completely rational.  What could be more realistic, more believable?   Such details and a great love for Mr Clarke forced me to read on despite the fact that I found large tracts of the book incomprehensible and eventually put it aside for a future year.  

It was quite a revelation to find that the Bronte children, three of whom at least progressed to becoming greatly celebrated, spent a number of years weaving a comparable world of fantasy around a set of toy soldiers given to nine year old Branwell.  Sadly he, as he grew older he was mostly celebrated locally for his drunkenness and ability to cause mayhem at the village pub.   Prior to his alcohol binges, however, not only were the adventures of his soldiers, known as the Twelve Young Men, elaborate but so was the world in which they lived, Glasstown.   This world was mapped in its entirety by Branwell complete with mountain ranges, rivers and trade routes. Each of the siblings governed and ruled over one of the four kingdoms within of which the overall capital was Verdopolis.  They then went one step further into their joint flight of fancy and wrote down the adventures in miniscule and meticulous writing within the pages of tiny books, some of which can only be read comfortably with the aid of a magnifying glass.

When I discovered Mary Norton’s Carnegie Medal winner, The Borrowers, I was more than happy to set aside the latest Enid Blyton.   Her tiny people living in the walls and under the floors of possibly quite ordinary houses was a simply thrilling idea.  The fact that they seemed to depend solely on the huge human inhabitants for food, shelter and safety seemed unique to me at the time.   That if the humans decided to get a cat their environment would become so unsafe they would have to emigrate, exhilarating.   Little wonder then that these tiny folk were very wary of us.   I became an immediate fan and the travels of Gulliver were propelled even further into the future.  

Although my own painstakingly intricate imaginary worlds became ever more complex, changing imperceptibly to match my growing life experience, it did not at any stage occur to me to turn them into what we would now call hard copy.  I did keep notes at one stage as a memory aid but only because I wanted to avoid such blunders as my various mini-families giving the same names to their children.   Occasionally I made drawings of the wardrobe items of the most significant females and as the years passed I became keen on compiling plans of their country cottages and city apartments.   The cottages were always of the thatched roof variety with gardens sporting sunflowers, hollyhocks and daisies and clearly set in Southfleet or Cobham  but the apartments were more austere.  I only clearly remember one ten storey stone building overlooking a local bend in the Thames where cooking facilities were totally absent and all residents ate out at nearby five storey restaurant complexes, different cuisines featured on each floor.    Over time I realised that the buildings of my imagination had somehow or other all become life size, human style.  

As a child I was very keen to keep these constructed realms largely to myself although I did share them occasionally with Molly from No 31.   Her own alternative reality mostly featured California and Doris Day at that time, apart from a brief and terrifying invention called The Land of Scabs & Blood.   She was of a more robust emotional nature and much less fearful of inviting ridicule for this habit of venturing from the here and now whereas I continued to feel that endless invention was not something to broadcast to all and sundry.  It was to be a long time before I realised that fabricated realities become a pattern for a great many children.

My daughter without much prompting created Bearland and for several years wrote a stream of very similar stories featuring the mundane happenings of a tribe of teddy bears headed by Aunt Harriet and Uncle Henry together with their progeny and a great many first and second cousins.  Determined to learn to type, once she did so her output became astonishingly rapid though the story content did not change very much.    

The penny eventually dropped and when, decades later I devised holiday seminars for those children who didn’t mind what was essentially more school in the holidays, the Creation of Imaginary Lands became a regular feature over several years.   This seminar option was extremely popular with some who were only too anxious to reveal their ideas for others to witness via maps, models and stories.  It was astonishing to see how some children even devised complex languages with a proper grammatical structure which was certainly something that had never occurred to me at a similar age.   I was in my forties before I finally got back to the adventures of Gulliver.