The Bulldozer at Childhood’s End

When I was in my teen years in my home town of Minehead there was a place I sometimes went that felt, to me, like a walk on the wild side. It was a pub called “The Carlton Plume of Feathers” and it had a reputation for being a dark, sinister portal to the underworld. That’s what I was looking for.

It was imbued with a sense of wildness and danger, even though nothing really ever happened that was out of the ordinary. Ordinary being the place where you could buy hash and where occasionally a biker gang would start a fight.

I’m trying to wind together about three different strands of irony here, so bear with me. Minehead, Somerset is the birth place of the legendary Science Fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. When I was really young I had my imagination broadened by his work and a couple in particular are quite memorable. I can’t say for sure if I ever read his novel, “Childhood’s End,” but it interweaves nicely with my narrative.

In my teen years I became much more taken with the absurdity of Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” This story begins with the bulldozing of the male protagonists house, and the destruction of earth to build a hyperspace express route.

Somehow I’m going to connect the dots.

When I started writing “Biblio’s Blood,” I was quite intentional about making my male protagonist a recognizable version of myself. I personally see that fiction is the perfect outlet for someone who wants to wrestle their demons in the public space, yet retain some clinical detachment. It was the name that would either help or hinder this process.

When you write for the purpose of entertaining yourself and others you have to be prepared for the eventuality of having to talk about what you’re doing. Whatever you name your book or your characters it’s going to have to be something that you are comfortable with and that, somehow, maintains your detachment from a character who may very well be an autobiographical render.

Douglas Adams did it well with his characters Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox. All three appear to be aspects of himself: Arthur the nervous worrier who is chokingly English, representing Douglas basic state; Ford the wild, free, alcohol facilitated partier who is who Douglas alter ego; and Zaphod… what can be said of Zaphod but that he was the person Douglas really wanted to be.

He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

So in combining the need to say something about who I am and where I’m from, while remaining anonymous, the naming of a character is a big deal. Carlton Feathers. I figured that if I decided later I didn’t like it, I’d change it. Here we are 14 years on and I’m sticking with it.

I haven’t been in England very much over the last 28 years so it was a shock to find that “The Carlton Plume of Feathers” was demolished to make way for a block of assisted living flats. How ironic given that, in Hitchhikers, Arthur Dent’s house was demolished to make way for a bypass and the earth was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Even more fitting then, perhaps, to pay homage to this place of my youth by preserving the name in a story. Quite poignant to find the picture of the place being bulldozed. Indeed, the bulldozer at childhood’s end seems a great way to combine the worlds created by Arthur C. Clarke and Douglas Adams.

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