A stroke of the pen, p.1
A Stroke of the Pen, page 1
Dedication
This volume is dedicated to Pat and Jan Harkin who have
spent countless hours in the British Newspaper Archive in
Boston Spa, Yorkshire, establishing the dates when the
episodes of the story ‘The Quest for the Keys’ were actually
published. As Rob Wilkins and I did not initially know when
they appeared, Pat and Jan had to check through thousands of
issues of the Western Daily Press and, while doing so,
discovered stories written by Terry under the pseudonym
Patrick Kearns, which are republished here for the first time.
And to Chris Lawrence who at the age of fifteen was so
impressed with Terry’s story ‘The Quest for the Keys’ that he
tore out the pages from the Western Daily Press in which it
appeared and kept them for forty years before he cut out the
columns, removing their dates, with happy consequences.
Had he not done so, the Harkins would not have
gone on their search and thus unearthed all the
rest of the stories in this book.
We are deeply in their debt.
Colin Smythe
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword by Neil Gaiman
Introduction by Colin Smythe
How It All Began . . .
The Fossil Beach
The Real Wild West
How Scrooge Saw the Spectral Light (Ho! Ho! Ho!) and Went Happily Back to Humbug
Wanted: A Fat, Jolly Man with a Red Woolly Hat
A Partridge in a Post Box
The New Father Christmas
The Great Blackbury Pie
How Good King Wenceslas Went Pop for the DJ’s Feast of Stephen
Dragon Quest
The Gnomes from Home
From the Horse’s Mouth
Blackbury Weather
The Blackbury Jungle
The Haunted Steamroller
The Money Tree
The Blackbury Thing
Mr Brown’s Holiday Accident
Pilgarlic Towers
The Quest for the Keys
The Quest for The Quest for the Keys, by Pat and Jan Harkin
Text Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Terry Pratchett
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword by Neil Gaiman
Terry Pratchett being now these eight years dead, I have watched at first hand as the living person I knew has become a legend of sorts. Terry is, in the popular mind, as far as I can tell, a beaming, gentle, wise soul of twinkling eye and noble mien, a sensible old comforter, able to be enlisted by people of widely differing beliefs into their camps because of course their Terry would have agreed with them, they love his books, don’t they? And I cannot help but feel that this semi-mythical Terry, like Merlin but with a witty quip instead of a wand and a slightly shorter beard, might as well exist in the popular mind as any other Terry Pratchett.
He is merrier than the Terry I remember, significantly less irascible, much less likely to hold opinions you disagree with (whoever you are reading this, whatever it is you believe, I promise that the real Terry held at least one opinion that would have made you curl your toes and go ‘Oh, come on, you don’t really think that!’); he is levelheaded and always lovable. The real Terry Pratchett was certainly lovable, but not always. He had, as he would have been the first to tell you, his days. Even I, and I still miss the real person I remember, am occasionally grateful for the new revised semi-legendary Terry Pratchett: we rarely disagree about what’s happening when I’m making Good Omens, for example, and that Terry mostly gives me his blessing to do as I think fit. (Having said that, we do disagree sometimes, or at least there are times when the Terry in my head is very clear on what we should be doing, and it’s not what I would have wanted to do, and then I sigh and do what I’m pretty sure Terry would have wanted instead of doing what I would probably have done.)
Sometimes, when I think of Terry, I miss the bits of the stories Terry would tell me – or even show me – that were never published. They would have been, I am sure, on the hard disk that was crushed by a steamroller after his death. The fragment of the story about Rincewind’s mother, for example. Or the Dunnikin Diver section of the novel Moving Pictures. They existed once but they are all gone now, crushed into fragments, bits and bytes reduced to bits and fragments of metal and silicon and glass.
When Rob Wilkins, Terry’s representative on Earth, called me and told me that a trove of Terry Pratchett stories had been unearthed by brilliant and dogged detectorists hunting through newspaper archives, I was unsure what to think.
And then I read the stories. And I smiled.
I wondered, though, as I read them, what Terry would have thought of these stories being found and presented to the world. And then I realized, because people are complicated, even when they aren’t being semi-legendary, it would probably depend which Terry, and at what point in his career.
The young Terry Pratchett who wrote them would have been proud of them, that’s for certain. He’s obviously working hard on them. He once told me that a journalist should think like a ram-raider – smash through the plate glass, grab what you can, and disappear into the night. These are ram-raider stories: he has a certain amount of space on the newspaper page, which means a certain number of words to fill it, no less and no more, and he’s going to start, build and finish his story to the word-count. He’s going to hook you as quickly as he can and drag you through to the end.
He’s not a humorist, not yet, and he’s definitely not the blazing satirist he would become. The Terry Pratchett who wrote these stories is a journalist who thinks that he is, in his soul, a science fiction writer, even if that’s not what he’s currently writing. (He told me when we first met that he was a science fiction writer. I believed him.) This Terry is the man who has written The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata, mashing up his favourite tropes by Larry Niven and Isaac Asimov, determined in each book to build his own universe from scratch but as yet unsure what he will do with it.
The stories in this book are, on the other hand and for the most part, set in the here and now. Or at least the hereish and the nowish. And they are, also for the most part, funny and fantasies. They feel more like the precursors of Discworld (or even the world of Good Omens) than either of Terry’s two early SF novels do.
It’s one of the hardest parts of being a writer, the growing up in public bit. Terry needed to be published. He didn’t have the time to spend polishing his skills in private. The Patrick Kearns identity allowed him to write fiction, to hone his craft, to discover, I suspect, what kind of thing he enjoyed making up and writing down. During these twenty tales he tries out a number of techniques – ‘How It All Began . . .’ uses the Cave People as Us, Inventing Things, for example, which Terry had encountered in one of his favourite books, Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man, while the Blackbury stories utilize a particular British Humour Style I tend to attribute to Norman Hunter, creator of Professor Branestawm, that is knowing and accessible for children, but with raisins of wit tossed in for adults. And through all of these stories we watch young Terry Pratchett becoming Terry Pratchett. There will be familiar turns of phrase, familiar names, there will be many moments where we see the mind of the Terry Pratchett that was still to come at play.
When does a young writer become the writer you love? Certainly ‘The Quest for the Keys’ is absolute proto-Discworld Pratchett, even if Morpork had not yet found its Ankh, and reading it made me feel the same way I do when an art scholar unearths an early version of a famous painting I’m familiar with and love. Change a couple of variables and ‘The Quest for the Keys’ might have been the template for The Colour of Magic.
I suspect that the Terry Pratchett of the middle years, building Discworld and honing his craft, would have been slightly embarrassed by the rediscovery of these stories. The Patrick Kearns stories would have been a distraction to him.
And Sir Terry Pratchett, the writer in his final years? What would he think about these stories being found and published?
I think he would have been happy that they were there to delight fans, and to intrigue the Pratchett scholars. (I don’t think he was ever comfortable with the existence of the Pratchett scholars, mind.)
I think he would have been proud of the young journalist who wrote them, and that, when he reread them, he might even have chuckled, amused or inspired by something a younger him had written, hidden behind an impenetrable pseudonym and buried in the dusty archives of the Western Daily Press for, the young Terry was certain, ever and ever and ever.
Neil Gaiman
May 2023
Introduction by Colin Smythe
It had always puzzled me that Terry’s inspiration for writing his Bucks Free Press-style short stories had dried up during parts of the 1970s.
Actually it had not: I just had not looked carefully enough. At the time of his writing The Dark Side of the Sun, Strata, and his first Discworld novel The Colour of Magic, he was also writing short stories for the Western Daily Press pseudonymously, and later once more under his own name.
So we welcome ‘Patrick Kearns’ to the Pratchett canon: we guessed that Patrick sounds close enough to Pratchett, and Kearns was his mother’s maiden name. And who else would have used Gritshire, Blackbury, Even Moor, and t he Ministry of Nuisances in their stories, or an academic institute whose name, the Blackbury Institute of Applied Nonsense, sounds suspiciously like something from the future Discworld’s Unseen University? I suspect that honourable practice among newspaper staff prevented him from writing in two papers at the same time under his real name, as at that time he was an employee of the Bath and West Evening Chronicle. But they have the unique hallmarks of tales by Terry Pratchett.
If it had not been for Chris Lawrence, who had torn out the relevant pages of the Western Daily Press, we would not have known of Terry’s 1984 story ‘The Quest for the Keys’, before January 2022. As Chris had not kept their publication dates, uber-fans Pat and Jan Harkin started going through the issues from the 1970s and the 1980s in the British Newspaper Archive in Boston Spa, Yorkshire, until they found them, and in the process also discovered the Kearns stories.
For all the years I was Terry’s publisher and then agent he never ever gave me any help in finding his shorter writings – but as he wrote in his dedication to me in Dragons at Crumbling Castle, there were stories he had ‘carefully hidden away and very deliberately forgot all about’. Just how true these words were, I had no idea. Maybe he really had forgotten about them. Certainly, neither Rob Wilkins nor I had ever heard of them.
It is with the greatest pleasure that we can at last share Terry’s lost stories with you now.
Colin Smythe
How It All Began . . .
Right from the start some of the older cavemen were completely against the idea.
‘It’s unnatural,’ they said. ‘Anyway, where’s it going to end?’
But the younger cavemen said: ‘That’s progress, grandad. Pass us another log.’
The thing was called ‘fire’, and it was brought back to the cave by Og the inventor, who said he found it eating a tree. You had to keep it in a little cage of stones, he said. It kept you ‘warm’, he said, which was the opposite of what you felt when the rain dripped into the cave at night.
Hal the chieftain was a bit puzzled and worried by it.
‘Are you sure nothing will go wrong this time?’ he asked. ‘It was bad enough when I was hit by one of your throwing sticks.’
‘Spears,’ corrected Og. ‘That was a design error, that was. This is foolproof. If you don’t feed it with wood, it dies.’
‘Remarkable,’ said Hal.
That night, the cavemen sat round the new fire and ate cold mammoth while giant creatures trundled and sneezed in the dark night outside. Og talked at length about the amazing possibilities of his invention. Hal just chewed his mammoth and watched the flames.
The fire bit him.
‘Ouch!’
‘You shouldn’t touch it,’ said Og hurriedly. ‘It’s snappish.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ said Hal huffily, and shuffled off sucking his finger.
One of the women was appointed to look after the fire and keep it fed while the men were hunting. Soon it was part of the cave way of life.
Then, one day, Og accidentally dropped a lump of wild pig into the fire and invented cookery. Cookery! Even Hal couldn’t disagree with that! There were twenty-seven ways of cooking mammoth, to start with.
There were dodo-egg omelettes with snake sauce. There were great slabs of baked boar with honey gravy. And, of course, there were toadstool pies and deadly nightshade soup, which was unfortunate.
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ said Og cheerfully. ‘We all make mistakes.’
There was no stopping him after that. He drew with charcoal on the cave walls and invented Art. He managed to tame a wolf puppy and invented Dogs. But the trouble really started later.
Og invented . . . well, he happened to leave some grapes in a bowl of water, and when he remembered them, they had fermented. The wine tasted lovely. When everyone came home from hunting, they all tried it too. All except Hal. He was still down on the plains chasing a particularly fast giraffe.
He stopped when he smelled smoke. It was coming from the cave.
‘!’ he thought. ‘The fire’s broken loose!’
Hal dropped his giraffe and ran. All round the cave the grass and trees were ablaze, and he grunted and swore as he crashed through the hot ash. Inside, the tribe were peacefully sleeping off the effects of Og’s latest invention.
‘Wake up!’ screamed Hal. ‘You’ve let the fire escape!’
And it was growing fast. For miles around great flames were crackling through the grass. Animals fled. Birds flew squawking out of the smoke.
Half blinded by smoke, choking in the hot air, the tribe were led by Hal down to the river. They slopped down among the rushes and burst into tears.
Hal was white with fury as he turned to the miserable Og.
‘Right,’ he growled. ‘That’s it. I’m not standing for any more. I’ve had enough. Everything you do leads to trouble. I’m a patient apeman, but this time you’ve gone too far. Get out of the tribe.’
Og slunk away through the reeds without a backward glance.
‘Is that wise?’ asked Ug, one of the oldest apemen. ‘He’ll perish all by himself.’
Hal snorted.
‘What chance has he left us, then? There’ll be no game for miles around. The fire doesn’t seem to have spread so far downriver. Come on. If we don’t move on, we’ll starve.’
All the next day they trudged through the mud. Here and there the fire was still burning, and where there were no flames there was just grey, hot ash.
In the evening it rained. The tribe slept fitfully in the branches of a charred tree, while growling sabre-toothed tigers prowled beneath them.
The rain continued all the next day. The tribe spent most of it huddled together in a little hollow in the rocks.
After a while someone said: ‘The fire was warm.’
And someone else added: ‘Cooked zebra was one of the best things that ever happened to me.’
As the sun sank into a mass of black clouds even Ug said wistfully: ‘He wasn’t a bad sort, in his way.’
Hal shivered. ‘He’d have probably set fire to the whole world if we’d let him,’ he muttered.
A wolf howled in the distance. Another one answered. It was much nearer.
Suddenly Hal saw the black shape padding around the edge of the hollow, and his hair stood on end.
‘Women and children in the centre!’ he yelled, reaching for a stone.
The wolves closed in. The apemen hit them with sticks and threw stones, but the wolves were desperate with hunger because of the fire. And more of them seemed to be appearing.
Then Og leapt into the hollow, holding a blazing branch in his hand. He hurled it at the wolves and started fiddling with an oddly shaped piece of wood. It was a bow. Arrows started raining down on the yelping pack.
He didn’t say anything. When the last of the wolves had fled, he simply beckoned the tribe to follow him and led them to a small clearing where several zebras were roasting over a fire. Under some trees he had built a strange sort of cave out of branches and bracken. It looked warm and inviting.
Well, Hal couldn’t refuse to let Og back into the tribe. Not since most of the apemen were already tucking in to slices of zebra.
‘I followed you. I thought you might need me eventually,’ was all Og said.
Soon a little village had been built.
Og discovered that seeds would grow, and invented Farming.
He invented animal traps, which was a much better way of catching meat than hunting. Then he invented wings, and unfortunately decided to try them out from the top of a cliff.
But several up-and-coming young apemen had got the idea and they invented Civilization – eventually.
The village grew. Some of the open plain was turned into fields. Pretty soon hunters like Hal were beginning to look a bit foolish. That’s how it all began.
Hal sat in front of his hut, looking thoughtful and feeling slightly uneasy.
‘I wonder where it’s all going to end?’
The Fossil Beach
Did you know that if you hold a seashell to your ear, you can hear the sea?
The noise gets stuck in the complicated curves of the shell and echoes around for ages. But what happens if it’s a fossilized seashell? I’ll tell you.
