Gnome Country - the novels of 'B.B.'

For a number of years I carried the memory of a show I watched as a young Simian after school. One was about three boys who went bush in the English countryside and had a distinctive piping theme tune. The other was a words and pictures tale of some little folk who went looking for one of their number called Cloudberry. Both eluded me for ages until I recently did the sensible thing and turned to Google. As it turned out, both series - respectively Brendan Chase and Baldmoney, Sneezewort, Dodder and Cloudberry were connected through their author/illustrator Denys Watkins-Pitchford, who wrote under the nom de plume 'B.B' (after the air rifle pellet and not an abbreviation of Bilbo Baggins.) No wonder I'd had difficult searching them out.


B.B. seems to have belonged to a specific generation of British writers who, affected by the changing landscape of post Industrial Revolution England turned their concern for the disappearing landscape into children's writing. If it's possible to draw a line from Tolkien to Richard Adams then that same line must pass through BB, whose stories are imbued with woodlands nostalgia.

In The Little Grey Men (1942) and its sequel Down the Bright Stream (1948) B.B. uses his gnome protagonists as vessels of concern as in both stories they traverse the waterways and woodlands of a changing countryside in search of their brother and, later, a new home  (the second tale has some kinship with Adams' Watership Down) these gnomes - Dodder, Baldmoney, Sneezewort and Cloudberry are the last of their kind, dwellers in a world of talking animals and where man is at best a blundering fool, at worst a monster. It's written well in a naive style akin to Tolkien's Hobbit, but with some of the attendant sexism and xenophobia of the age. Nevertheless, for the most part the gnomes are well characterised, with Dodder in particular developing between the books in an arc worthy of a Baggins.

I found the books affecting - not quite as epic in scope or dour as Watership Down, but very charming and highly readable. Watkins-Pitchford effectively captures a world in macrocosm, with a population and sense of community, but devoid of politics or human concerns. Don't be fooled though - there's a darkness in these books including treachery, cruelty and murder. Cast members die in natural and unnatural ways, and though the face of God isn't present in B.B.'s woodland, the great god Pan is, in a striking and surreal chapter which precipitates some remarkable character turns among the gnomes. Similarly in Bright Stream the growing sinister truth about one of their number leads to a genuinely tense chapter of skullduggery and truly natural justice. All the while Watkins-Pitchford's  distinctive writing elegises the loss of the gnomes world, a quiet voice in the wilderness. And his illustrations are gorgeous.

The takeaway for me, as mentioned in my earlier post, is in the nature of the gnomes themselves. Here B.B imbues them as spokemen of a vanishing natural world, dodging beasts and men, habitat destruction, and even after the fires and noises of the Blitz are heard but not entirely fathomed by them on their last great journey, ultimately abandoning England for a home of older myth and safer refuge. There's much in keeping with the Seventies version of Huygen's text - and in fact, given that B.B's works concern themselves chiefly with the last gnomes of England,  they needn't be mutually exclusive. I believe there's a place for this version of the Gnome in a modern RPG - and in fact, there already is, in the independent RPG Tales from the Wood, and it's in my next post that I'll turn to this.

In the mean-time, I made some notes based on the gnomes and their world for anyone interested below:

To Enhance Your Land Raiding Needs

Hey - look! I found another vehicle to complement this one!

A recent school fair (pro tip: always go to the posh school fairs. Their toy areas have LEGO!) I picked up this poor beauty. Who is she - this poor creature who once saw better days in a blister box with a company of silver plastic future cop guys ? Yes, this is the K-2002 Flight Hunter from Matchbox's Adventure 2000 die cast set. I never had this one. My friend Derek did, but even in this state I wasn't going to let him be the only person I know who owned one.

Oof, but whoever her previous owner was, it was not a little old lady who only took her to church on Sundays (as much as I'd like to see that.) Here's what it should look like: All gull-wing doors, laser turret and snap-out red wings - y'know, for flight! 

Well, the doors open here, but they don't close flush. There's chrome effect off the shiny bits, but that's to be expected. And there are no- repeat NO wings. Not one. They've been pulled out of this thing. I don't even know where the button goes that makes them emerge. Hang on - no, it's the hole behind the cockpit. That makes sense.

Still, she's intact, and the windscreen glass is in great nick. Most of what's there is still there - it just looks lived in. Turning it over though - yikes, those axles! What was her payload?!

Oh, you poor baby. Why did I pick you up? Because I wanted to rescue you! And maybe... just maybe I think I can fix you. So onto the project pile you go!

Gnome Maintenance

Recently I've been thinking about Gnomes. I confess, I've been feeling a little guilty about them.

 For a number of years I've thought on and off about the place of these little guys in the various editions of Dungeons and Dragons, and why in its Basic form they never distiguished themselves enough to be Player Characters. Sure, they're there among the Monsters in Mentzer's red box, and in the Moldvay Expert Set a floorplan of a Gnome lair appears, but by and large I suspect that early players just treated them as I and my friends did when we played - easy Experience Points. Kill them all!!! After I stopped playing of course the Companion module Earthshaker! came out, and then the supplement Top Ballista!, but these were, to my mind, mid-edition AD&D Gnomes retro-fitted in.

In D&D's Basic rules, Gnomes are NPC characters at best. They have an entry among the other 'Monsters' in the red box DM's Guide - and that's pretty much it. Cross over to the various versions of AD&D however, and it's a different story. For whatever reason the Gnome was abandoned in the Moldvaying and Mentzerising of the core game (fellow casualty races of course include the Half-Orc and Half-Elf), the race gets something of an on-going revision within the various iterations of the 'Advanced' game. First edition casts them as Halfling-sized Dwarf variants with similar attributes and an enmity with Kobolds (this is the version translated over to Moldvay/Mentzer); and as the game gets older the Gnome derives its own variants - Rock, Deep, Forest, and so forth. Originally given the option of an Illusionist specialty, Gnomes are later cast as Bards (another unloved and un-developed character class) and by 4th and 5th edition Gnomes really come into their own as tinkerers and tricksters - crazy inventors with a love of mischief.

I can't say I'm mad about the idea of Gnomes being cast so much along personality, particularly a personality almost purpose-built to irritate the hell out of fellow players or unbalance your campaign world with quasi high-tech. Indeed, I've heard of some groups who mutually have decided to just not include Gnomes for that reason.

Back in Basic-land I guess for purists the temptation in bringing the Gnome in as a Player Character is to adopt the D&D version - but even that has its critics. The popular argument goes: why use a Gnome when you could use a Dwarf? They generally live in the same areas, have similar cultures and a weakness of underground treasures. Or why not just use a Halfling, if you're after a diminutive Thief? There is of course the Illusionist class type to be imported - but a combination of magic and fighting ability in Basic is the domain of Elves; and a potentially weak fighter with a less-offensive array of spells may not have much going for it for players. So what then?

I believe the problem with the shifting niche of Gnomes is that they apparently lack a clear literary or mythological archetype. Gnomes in culture go only as far back as Paracelsus and the 16th century, and have no mythological or folklore precedent, which may be why they are often switched for Dwarfs (or dwarfs) in stories. The original Gnome is a theoretical earth elemental, but with more description becomes... a Dwarf with the registration number filed off. But what about in literature?

Ask anyone who lived through the Seventies about books with Gnomes in them and they may well recall Will Huygen's Gnomes(1974), the twentieth-century imprimatur that put the Gnome - pointed hat, jolly face, fulsome beard, well and truly in the public consciousness. If your common or garden Gnome wasn't already, well, a garden gnome, then this book would do little to change that.

But there is another literary precedent to the Gnome, and one that pre-dates Huygen's field guide by nearly three decades. 'B.B.''s The Little Grey Men and its sequel Down the Bright Stream* posits the adventures of the last four Gnomes in Britain, and places the race firmly in the woods as one of Pan's people (don't laugh). For all of that, however, 'B.B.' and Huygen seem to have seized on the Gnome in a smiliar fashion - they are guardians of the earth, forest-dwellers, and immensely practical, without recourse to tinkering with large-scale machinery (there are exceptions, but they are clearly not the rule).

The up-shot of this is that I think I've found a decent niche for the Gnome in a Basic D&D setting, and one which is rigid enough to avoid the overlap with the game's two other dimunitive PC races. Having read both Huygen's book and B.B.'s two novels, I considered the woodland guardian element of these texts and thought that with a brace of Druid spells one could effectively accommodate the race without too much hard work. That did do for my other idea of swapping Magic User spell sets for Elves with Druid spells, though. And in the end, I didn't want to do that. So my Gnomes are not especially magical - just like the literary ones, but they retain their woodland expertise, loyalties and preternatural identity. Rather than making them Druids I seem to be casting the Gnome as a Race-As-Class Ranger. And I think I'm pretty happy with that!

[Insert obligatory video. NO, no that one**]
[* Blogger's note: 'B.B' was the nom de plume of D. J Watkins-Pitchford, who also provided the wonderful illustrations - painting, etchings and line art, in both volumes. The name was apparently taken from the ball-bearing gun pellet and wasn't, as my thirteen-year-old self assumed, a cash-in on the name Bilbo Baggins]

[** This song's nomination is more apposite than you may think, as Syd Barrett was a huge fan of the books and the writer, a quote from the first book was read at Barrett's funeral]

Scar Man, Car Man... Corman.

So, apparently this is a thing: Roger Corman is prducing a sequel/equal to one of his greatest and most influential movies, Death Race 2000.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Statham remake. DVD, et cetera. But still - this is Corman; the last thing we could accuse the man of is an unfaithful, cynical big-budget remake. It'll have NO budget!

The other thing that needs to be said is that I have a TERRIBLE track record advance-endorsing doomed movies.

So I'm not endorsing this one at all.

Fear of a Chicken Duck Woman Thing

Last week found me casting my mind back twenty years or so to the temporary musical career of the younger Simian, and how, aided by a nifty cassette Walkman since lost in a freak library incident, a friend managed to play one of my compositions (fittingly titled 'Rewind Mind') backwards. Taping the resulting sounds, we picked out weird semi-words and phrases, putting together a new version of the song which my friend (rather uncharitably, I thought) dubbed 'I am a Dwarf' from its most-repeated alleged utterance. In the end we failed to find the Devil in my music, but as an experiment in backwards masking we were lucky to find anything at all. I wonder where that tape got to in the end...

Anyway, I love serendipity, and the moment where something accidental and organic gives birth to a new and exciting creation. Sadly, most of my best artwork arose out of slips of the pen or brush, and many a waking dream has provided inspiration of some kind. My hat is off, then, to this month's ear worm, borne of a line from Bad Lip Reading's treatment of A New Hope. If I'd thought that their earlier Redneck Avengers was a work of quiet genius, then this raises the bar again. Funny, surreal, and oddly moving.


Better than anything George came up with, I reckon.

Kooks

Earlier this week I checked in to a sweltering Sydney hotel at the end of a tiring flight to a work conference. As I approached the registration desk my eyes wandered up to the tv screen on the wall behind; local, trivial news played out in silence while headlines ticker-taped at the bottom. Among them were three words: 'David Bowie Dies", with the following precis a vague note about 'rumors on social media'. They just sort of hung there, and then drifted offscreen while my fatigued brain tried to process it - naturally, I wasn't sure whether to believe it or not. Finally in my room I turned on the tv to a news channel and the truth revealed itself. It was 7pm local time, and according to reports, London was just waking up to the news.

My first thought was of Jet Junior - he's a huge Bowie fan. I'm not sure why, although lots of music was playing in our house when he was young, and as a toddler visually he seemed to connect with the more flamboyant, like Ziggy/Aladdin Sane era Bowie and Live Aid Freddie Mercury. It brought out the flamboyant kid in him, too, randomly stopping lunch during a visit from Granddad with an impromptu and never-to-be-repeated lip-synching of Suffragette City. He was determined to go to New York to meet his idol, and invite him to join his band. My own discovery of Bowie was a very long process indeed, but my boy just took to him very readily - we share a love of the Ziggy album, and he especially likes Low, the instrumentals in particular. This drove his mum a little bit nuts when he kept it on high rotate for a while.

Mrs Simian and I had spent last Monday morning discussing my imminent week of absence and what the two of them could do while I was away. He's not seen The Force Awakens yet, so why not take him, knowing now what would be in store in terms of heavy plot turns? Little did we know bigger stuff would of course be just around the corner. I hated not being at home with him when he heard the news; he was, apparently, very upset.

Meanwhile, Australia was processing the news as well, and it was front page splash stuff at breakfast on all the papers. Mention was made of Bowie's connection with Australia, the Let's Dance and China Girl videos, his sometime hideaway in Elizabeth Bay and his outspoken views on Aboriginal rights. At the conference the chosen theme music of the first day (Starship and Pseudo Echo - there was a damned good reason. There had to have been) segued the following day into a quiet background set of Bowie's best, which was a little distracting for me as my ears kept straining to place the bits and pieces during workshops. Was that Moonage Daydream? Yes! The Man Who Sold the World? Of course. 'Heroes'? Inevitably. Attendees of my generation shared their impressions of the news in quiet moments, and it was in a small way cathartic.

I returned home, finally, in the weekend, to a tidy and quiet house. The news had dissipated, with life going on, but Jet Junior and I shared a wet afternoon in front of You Tube, with him in the driver's seat and an awful lot of Bowie playing. He's still to see The Force Awakens; will there be tears after that, as there were on Tuesday morning? Not sure, but this time I'll be around, just in case.

In the Years of the Scavenger.

"I do get the feeling that by listening to the album we can kind of get closer to you than we have for many years, in terms of knowing who you are and where you are at?"

[Pause]

"You know, Jonathan, that'll never happen."

Bowie on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, 2002.

I first discovered David Bowie in the early Seventies as a young child, listening to The Laughing Gnome played on the Sunday morning children's show on an orange Aztec radio in my room. I can't remember what I thought of the song - I think I liked the sped-up voices.

I first discovered David Bowie in 1979, in television advertisements for the Australasian collection 'David Bowie! Chameleon'. Snatches of songs - 1984, Sorrow, over the top of weird and jarring images from his music videos lingering in my young mind. DJ featured heavily; Venetian blinds, mixing desks, a gas mask and boiler suit.

I first discovered David Bowie in 1979 on Star Trek, a compilation of Sci-Fi-themed music and songs. My brother and I had bought it for the Star Wars and War of the Worlds themes, probably, but this also featured sound-alike versions of Space Oddity, Life on Mars? and Starman alongside other knockoffs of Elton John, Boney M and The Carpenters. They were the definitive versions of the songs for me until...

I next discovered David Bowie on a three-album collection of Sixties British pop, the real Space Oddity featuring alongside the likes of The Honeydrippers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Petula Clark and Cliff Richard. The box-set collage featured Bowie in an anachronistic Ziggy guise. I wasn't taken in.

I then discovered David Bowie as a creepy, unearthly figure, the singer of the irresistible Cat People (Putting Out Fire) which loomed large in my pre-adolescent subconscious, and of Ashes to Ashes, an even freakier video in which he tiptoed around a woozy landscape dressed like a scary clown (or, as I noted mere months later, Doctor Who in 'Watcher' form), or as a thrashing astronaut brought down to a suburban nightmare. Even I knew that Major Tom was a junkie by then. 

Then I discovered David Bowie with Let's Dance and China Girl; and, inspired by information gleaned from a courtesy cousin 'enthusiast', made my own compilation of Bowie songs, one side of a C60 cassette combining the various records we had and off-air radio recordings. "That's Bowie-", the excited announcer cries out at the end of Let's Dance; an addition I'm utterly unable to edit out, but which at least convinces me that once you're on top of the world you don't need two names. Like the rest of my class I was a fan. Briefly.

Then I forgot Bowie, and found him again, and set him aside once more for other things. He did duets with Tina Turner, movies like Labyrinth and Absolute Beginners, the Glass Spider Tour, floundering fare like Tonight and Never Let Me Down, and a classmate was such an ardent fan I avoided Bowie for years.  I was done. There were more interesting and less try-hard and pretentious artists out there. Like Sting!

I discovered Bowie in the smoky, incense-fogged bedroom of a bandmate on a loose Saturday night not gigging. He played Hunky Dory and pointed out, quite rightly, that it had a lot going on over the Flying Nun stuff I was immersed in. Even Andy Warhol.

Then Bowie turned fifty and had a big party with my university favourite acts, like Robert Smith, Frank Black, Billy Corgan and Foo Fighters. He released Earthling and Little Wonder, went all drum-n-bass and jungle, and in the middle of a brief but colourful UK glam revival in the Nineties, I was intrigued. Bowie pointedly didn't do the glam bits, but he didn't need to when the likes of Suede, Babylon Zoo, Spacehog, Placebo, Nicky Wire and Todd Haynes were happy to tip their hats to the master.

I rediscovered Bowie wearing headphones in a city dentist's chair in Wellington, listening to a supplied CD (Suffragette City), one of the most exciting songs I'd ever heard the man play. And being played by a Cuba Street busker (Ziggy Stardust). He was everywhere. I bought two compilations (The Best of David Bowie 1969-1973, The Best of David Bowie 1974-1979) and listened to it - selectively.

Then Bowie came to Wellington, and on a very rainy night I went to the concert. More on that later. Graham Reid produced three excellent overviews of the man's music for Radio NZ, interspersed with some earlier interviews. It was an education, uncovering more deep cuts to my growing knowledge - The Belway Brothers, Memories of a Free Festival, It's No Game. I think I still have the tapes somewhere...

Dad Rock ensues. Nothing to see here.

Then I rediscovered David Bowie through Jet Junior, who was, like many of his generation, an early adopter of the futuristic. Bowie songs grew and grew among our bedtime song collections. I finally discovered the simple genius of Absolute Beginners and its gorgeous C#m to Gdim drop through playing it on a ukulele of all things. But then, as Jet Jr would remind you, Bowie composed Lust for Life on a ukulele, so there. Kooks was my favourite to sing to him, and still is.

I'm still discovering David Bowie.