A Girl Called Bermuda

Spoiler: This post, like many of those which follow it, will not make the slightest sense if you haven't read the book(s). This blog is for people who have read the book(s), and would like to know more about them. If you're just after free content to read on your lunch break, go surf Google Plus. Or you could buy the book(s), of course.....

FACT: The first child to be born to the first colonists of the sub-tropical island of Bermuda was a girl. Her parents christened her "Bermuda". She died in infancy.

FACT: My dear friend and honorary sister, Anne-Marie, looks both sinister and sexy in a trench coat.

These two facts may seem like an unpromising beginning for a work of fiction. But they were, admittedly somewhat curiously, the original impetus for a body of writing which eventually became The Shattered Land.

The Shattered Land originally started as a bedtime story for the author's child. So, for instance, did Watership Down - a book which contains passages of such terror and violence that if anyone read it nowadays, and made a fuss on Facebook, the PC brigade would probably have it banned. More power to Richard Adams' elbow in my view. Anyone who's spent any time around children will know what nasty little bastards they can be, and far better to have their nasty, violent instincts subsumed in reading fiction than having them acting them out on each other, or old ladies, or innocent passers-by. Of course, it's easier with Watership Down, because it's about cute bunny rabbits, plus there was the cartoon film with the nice Art Garfunkel song, so that must be all right...

My son, as it happens, was born on Bermuda. His mother and I were living there at the time, because I'd got a job there with a bank and everyone wants to live in a tropical paradise, don't they? We left when he was two and he has never had much connection with the place of his birth, mainly because neither I nor his mother makes enough money to afford the air fares to take him there. So, when he was about eight, I thought it might be kind of cool to write him his very own bedtime stories, set on the island of Bermuda. And I started from the two premises with which I started this article.

The story I wrote him - which eventually became a trilogy - was entitled A Girl Called Bermuda. Still a good title, but if anyone wants to use it for a work that is, well, publishable, I'd say they really need to be Bermudian, because one of the characteristics of small island societies is that you don't really know them unless you're a native. Any Bermudian who wants this title for their own can use the contact form provided here. I will gift it to you. My price will be an EPUB copy of the finished book, which I think is pretty damn reasonable for a title like that.

It was, of course, a comedy. It was heavily influenced by two wonderful British writers of comic fantasy: Terry Pratchett and (even more), Robert Rankin. One of these men is very famous. Both of them should be. It also contained elements suggested by another of my literary heroes, Spike Milligan, and particularly his novel Puckoon.

I didn't have a computer at the time - I was working as a waiter* in Derbyshire by then and was, therefore, very poor (or, at any rate, I didn't have very much money - which is not at all the same thing, of course). So I wrote them in longhand in three bound A4 week-on-a-page desk diaries, like small ledgers. Certain passages were written on my dinner-break at work - they were written, again in long-hand, on restaurant order forms, which were the only paper I had available - which is why A Girl Called Bermuda is the only book ever written in which certain paragraphs are divided into 'starters', 'main courses' and 'desserts'. I would then sellotape these order forms to the relevant pages in the desk diaries.

(* Not in a cocktail bar. That's a Human League song.)

I read him these stories at, of course, bedtime. Unfortunately, since they were a comedy, they had the opposite effect to that which was required, which was to send him to sleep. We would often end up giggling over them till an hour which would have got me Reported To Someone, had he not had the great good sense to keep firmly shtum about the matter when questioned at school. There was a bit about a moped chase, involving a Death Defying Leap across the Smallest Drawbridge In The World, which was a particular favourite.

The Smallest Drawbridge In The World. You can say the last three words in a Jeremy Clarkson voice if you like.

The reason all this is relevant to The Shattered Land is the characters.

There was, for a start, a mysterious French Baroness in a trench-coat, who spent the early part of the book frightening the wits out of everyone, only to be revealed, in a crucial scene, to be one of the "Good Guys". There was a laid-back and cowardly American hippy named Zimmerman (I originally based him on a photo I saw of Bob Dylan, but changed his name after Ben Elton used the name Zimmerman in a novel entitled Stark). There was a billionaire named Mr Thompson. There was an evil computer genius named Lars Larsson (the greatest undiscovered scientific genius of his age), who had long, lank, blond hair, bottle-thick spectacles and poor social skills. There was a barmaid. For complex personal reasons, she was named "Albert" in this story, not Alison - although there was also a character called Alison. It was all a lot of fun; also very, very silly and entirely unpublishable.

At the time, I was trying to write the Great English Novel. I'm glad I don't have to pretend to have the ability to do that any more. What changed things was the realisation, some years later, that I was never going to write the Great English Novel. I sat, one day, outside a pub with a pint, and decided that the best fun I'd had as a writer ever was in writing A Girl Called Bermuda. And therefore, that it might be a good idea to try doing something like that.

Two days later, I sat down at a very elderly computer in the pantry off my kitchen and wrote the words:

"From the top of the hill, at midnight, Joseph Ackerman saw the town below as a handful of orange jewels, scattered in the darkness."

But that's another story....