Punch says, ‘Thats right thats what I rime with.’
Erny says, ‘O I see your names Jack then.’
Punch says, ‘No stupid my names Punch.’
Erny says, ‘Wel whack dont rime with Punch.’
Punch says, ‘Thats becaws you jumpt a way too soon. Come close agen.’
Erny comes close and qwick Punch gives him a woal lot of whacks. Punch says, ‘Now Ive give you a bunch hows that for riming.’
Erny says, ‘Wel I think Ive had a nuff of riming Mr Punch. I wunner wud you please be good a nuff and tel me what that putcha putcha means?’
Punch says, ‘You mean that putcha putcha putcha?’
Erny says, ‘Thats it.’
Punch says, ‘You mean that putcha putcha way?’
Erny says, ‘Thats it thats the same and very. Whats it mean?’
Punch says, ‘Putcha self closer and Iwl tel you.’
Erny puts his self closer. Punch whacks him on the ear with his stick. Whack! Erny says, ‘Ow! Thats 1 mor whack youve give me. What wer that 1 for?’
Punch says, ‘Thats what putcha way means. If you putcha close Iwl whack you but if you putcha way I cant.’
Erny says, ‘Wel Mr Punch Im thanking you for that lessing and that lerning only that aint what I putcha my self here for.’
Punch says, ‘Why did you putcha self here then? Why did you putcha putcha putcha?’
Erny says, ‘I wer hoaping for a look at Pooty. Jus a littl glimpo you know.’
Punch says, ‘No I dont know. You dont nead no look nor you dont nead no glimpo you can see her by her pongo. All you nead to do is breave deap and youwl get the woal picter of Pooty right a nuff. Youwl see the 3s and the Ds of her so sharp youwl think you can grab a hanful.’
Erny says, ‘Stil and all Iwd like to how dyou do her.’
Punch says, ‘You what?’
Erny says, ‘Iwd like to how dyou do her.’
Punch says, ‘O youre a clynt then?’
Erny says, ‘Which Iwd like to be a frend.’
Punch says, ‘O wunt we all tho wunt we jus. Pooty she dont have no frends tho. She dont give no 1 sumfing for nuffing.’
Pooty comes up then with the pig babby she gives it to Punch she says, ‘Whats this then if it aint some thing for nuffing?’
Punch says, ‘Nuffing! You calling my part nuffing?’
Pooty says, ‘You said it I dint.’
Punch terns to the crowd he says, ‘Now you see why Ive got the hump.’
Pooty says, ‘This aint no time for humping Im frying now.’
Punch takes a littl tase of Pooty he says, ‘You aint done yet.’
Pooty says, ‘I know that wel a nuff thats why Im going down to get on with it now wil you mynd the babby?’
Punch says, ‘Not a bit. Mmmmm. Yum yum yum.’
Pooty says, ‘Whyd you say “Yum yum yum”?’
Punch says, ‘I wer jus clearing my froat.’
Pooty says, ‘For what?’
Punch says, ‘So I can sing to the babby.’
Pooty says, ‘What kynd of song you going to sing?’
Punch says, ‘Yummy py.’
Pooty says, ‘Whatd you say?’
Punch says, ‘Lulling by. Iwl sing the babby lulling bys.’
Pooty terns to the crowd she says, ‘Wud you please keap a eye on him wylst Im frying my swossages. Give us a shout wil you if he dont mynd that babby right.’
Theres plenny of voyces in the crowd then speaking up theyre saying, ‘Dont you worry Pooty wewl keap a eye on him.’ Easyers voyce says, ‘Wewl see your babby right Pooty that littl crookit barset he bes not try nothing here.’
Punch he dont anser nothing to that. When Pooty goes down hes zanting a littl with the babby its a littl jerky kynd of dants. Hes singing:
‘There wer a littl babby
A piglet fat and juicy
Who ever got ther hans on him
They cudnt tern him lucey
Ah yummy yummy yummy
Ah slubber slubber sloo
Ah tummy tummy tummy
Ah piggy piggy poo’
Which when they hear that some of the crowd begin to yel, ‘Pooty! Pooty! Come up qwick!’
Punch he terns on them he says, ‘What kynd of peopl are you as wont let a father sing to his oan littl chyld?’
Pooty shes up then she says to the crowd, ‘Whats he ben doing then has he droppt the babby or any thing like that?’
Some 1 says, ‘Hewl do wersen that you bes take that babby a way from him.’
Pooty says to Punch, ‘Now you wont let no harm come to him wil you. Our oan sweet littl babby.’
Punch says, ‘Harm is where the hert is.’
Pooty says, ‘Wel there you are who wud have the hart to hert a babby.’
Punch says, ‘Hart is where the wud is.’
Pooty says, ‘What wood wud that be?’
Punch says, ‘Its all ways the same wud innit. That 1 jus over there. Wewl do a littl walky walky there.’
Pooty says, ‘Thats it a littl walky walky wil do the babby good. I wont be a minim Iwl jus get on with that frying.’
Pootys down agen and Punch hes got the loan of the babby. He puts the babby down he backs off a littl way he hols out his arms he says, ‘Walky walky.’
That littl pig babby it goes slyding tords him like its on a string. Punch hes smyling tho his wood joars they cant realy open can they. He says, ‘O wot a good babby!’ He puts the babby back where it startit from he says, ‘Walky walky.’
The babby says, ‘Wah!’
Punch says, ‘O no dont cry you musnt cry.’
The babby yels, ‘Wah!’
Punch says, ‘O so juicy o so terbel juicy!’ He grabs the babby.
No sooner does Punch get his hans on that babby nor in comes a big hairy han which it grabs Punch and my han inside Punch.
Its Easyer he yels, ‘You littl crookit barset I tol you not to try nothing here!’
Over goes the fit up and me and Punch and the babby and Easyer with it. 1 minim Easyers on top of me and the nex he dispears theres a han grabbit him sames his han grabbit Punch. Its Rightway Flinter which when I get my self untangelt from the fit up and on my feet its him and Easyer pulling datter to see which 1 wil walk a way when theyre finisht.
Its Rightway walks a way. Easyer is laid out flat. Rightway says to Riser Partman the regenneril guvner man from the Ram, ‘When he comes roun you myswel let him be Big Man here hewl work hard at it.’
Riser Partman he aint a bad looking kynd of man hes got inky fingers he says to Rightway, ‘What about you?’
Rightway says, ‘Ive got elser to be.’
We dint over the nite there we roadit out in to the dark which Rightway had it on him he wantit to be on the move right then. Him and his brother Deaper they boath come with us they dint want to stop at Weaping no mor. They boath of them have wives and childer the woal lot roadit out with us they jus slung ther bundels and a way.
When we gone out thru the gate there wer a kid up on the hy walk sames I use to be up there all times of nite when I wer a kid. 7 or 8 he wer may be. Sharp littl face liting and shaddering in the shimmying of the gate house torches. Sharp littl face and he begun to sing:
‘Riddley Walkers ben to show
Riddley Walkers on the go
Dont go Riddley Walkers track
Drop Johns ryding on his back’
Now whered that kid ever hear of Drop John and what put it in his mynd to sing that of me? Why dint I ask him? I dont know. May be I dint want to know.
Why is Punch crookit? Why wil he all ways kil the babby if he can? Parbly I wont never know its jus on me to think on it.
Riddley Walkers ben to show
Riddley Walkers on the go
Dont go Riddley Walkers track
Drop Johns ryding on his back
Stil I wunt have no other track.
Afterword
Only faint earth-green outlines remain of the fifteenth century wall painting, The
Legend of St Eustace, in the north choir aisle of Canterbury Cathedral. Across the aisle from it is Dr Tristram’s reconstruction, in sections, with the printed legend. The story of Eustace moves from the bottom to the top of the vertical composition, the scale of the figures and other elements varying according to their importance and chronology. The central figure and the largest, the one to which the eye is immediately drawn, is that of Eustace standing in a river, praying. His wife has been carried off by pirates and now his two little sons are taken away, one by a lion on the right bank and the other by a wolf on the left bank. Eustace is all alone in the middle of the river, hoping for better times. Seeing him for the first time that day in 1974 I had a strong fellow-feeling.
People ask me how I got from St Eustace to Riddley Walker and all I can say is that it’s a matter of being friends with your head. Things come into the mind and wait to hook up with other things; there are places that can heighten your responses, and if you let your head go its own way it might, with luck, make interesting connections. On March 14th, 1974 I got lucky.
It was my first visit to Canterbury; I’d given a talk at the Teachers’ Centre the evening before, and next morning my host, Dennis Saunders, County Inspector for English, showed me around the cathedral. I’m writing this in 1998, in the Oprah Winfrey era when millions are bursting to share their most private experiences with other millions; but I find that the Canterbury in me, having worded its way into Riddley Walker, wants to stay mostly unworded now. The cathedral is what it is; as soon as we came into the nave I could feel the action of the place, and by the time we reached The Legend of St Eustace I was ready for something to happen.
* * *
On the facing page: “The Legend of St Eustace.” Reconstruction by Professor Tristram of wall painting (c. 1480) in the north choir aisle of Canterbury Cathedral. Reproduced with the permission of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury.
As I stood before the picture there came to me the idea of a desolate England thousands of years after the destruction of civilisation in a nuclear war; people would be living at an Iron Age level of technology and such government as there was would make its policies known through itinerant puppeteers. I know it sounds strange but that’s how it was.
Why puppets? Punch and Judy had been in my thoughts ever since reading, some time before coming to England, two New Yorker articles by Edmund Wilson about English puppeteers. I hadn’t yet seen a show but soon after my Canterbury visit I saw Percy Press and Percy Press Jr do one in Richmond; after that it was inevitable that Mr Punch would find his way into Riddley Walker sooner or later.
In my first Page One on May 14th there was a Eusa man with puppets but the writing was in standard English. Here are my first paragraphs:
The Eusa man stood outside in the rain and sent his partner in first. The partner was well over six feet tall, had a bow and a quiver of arrows on his back, a big knife, and four rabbits hanging from his belt. He had hands that looked as if they could break anything or squeeze it to death. He poked about with his spear, looked here and there behind things. He seemed to take the place in with all his senses at once, took in the feel of it as an animal would.
The Eusa man stood with his bundle on his back and leant on his stick while the steam came up from his sweating back and the dogs sniffed him. He didn’t seem to mind the rain that came down on his little old hat or the mud he stood in.
‘Okay,’ said the partner.
The Eusa man bent down so his bundle would clear the opening and came inside.
‘Wotcher?’ he said.
That first Page One had domesticated dogs in it but soon these disappeared and in later drafts the only dogs were the killers that Riddley became friendly with. I like those dogs; there needed to be danger outside the fences and they were it—forlorn and murderous, full of lost innocence and the 1st knowing. Activated by the ancient blackened Punch he finds in the mud at Widders Dump, Riddley goes over the fence and joins up with the danger that’s waiting for him.
In that first Chapter One the Littl Shynin Man hasn’t yet become the Addom—he’s Lilla Jesu. From the start the story had a life of its own; the metamorphosis of Lilla Jesu into the Addom showed that it was finding its way.
Early on the language began to slide towards Riddleyspeak; I like to play with sounds, and when alone in the house I often talk in strange accents and nonsense words. The grammatical decline began with the dropping of the auxiliary verb in the present perfect tense; many of the children I went to school with in Pennsylvania spoke that way: ‘I been there’ and ‘I done that.’ One thing led to another, and the vernacular I ended up with seems entirely plausible to me; language doesn’t stand still, and words often carry long-forgotten meanings. Riddleyspeak is only a breaking down and twisting of standard English, so the reader who sounds out the words and uses a little imagination ought to be able to understand it. Technically it works well with the story because it slows the reader down to Riddley’s rate of comprehension.
I did a fair amount of research in Kent while working on the book and the place names came to me without much trouble. In a camper van with my wife and our small sons I explored the Wye valley and the Crundale (Bundel) Downs and visited the towns in Fools Circel 9wys. Horny Boy is Herne Bay; Widders Bel is Whitstable; Father’s Ham is Faver-sham; Bernt Arse is Ashford; Fork Stoan is Folkestone; Do It Over is Dover; Good Shoar is Deal, where I paid a boatman to take me out to the Goodwin Sands; Sams Itch is Sandwich; and of course Cambry is Canterbury. Sometimes special trips were required, as when I rode on the pillion seat of Richard Holt’s motorbike to a forest near Canterbury to ascertain whether I could see my hand in front of my face on a moonless night. I couldn’t. Frank Streich flew me over the South Downs in his Cessna. I drove to Reculver (Reakys Over) where I saw the Roman wall and the ruin of the Victorian church and listened to the lapping of the sea. Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 maps were my constant companions; nautical charts also. Drop John the Foller Man got his name after I found the part of the Thames Estuary called Knock John.
I had a lot of fun letting words wear themselves down into new words and new meanings. I did this with people’s names also; apart from the obvious ones there are Belnot Phist (Nobel physicist) and his father 1 stoan (Einstein) Phist; Straiter Empy would in our time be a morally upright M.P.; Erny Orfing, unlike Pry Mincer Abel Goodparley, who is a capable smoothtalker, is an earnest political orphan. If words aren’t working for you they’re working against you, so I tried to get as much story action into my words as possible: ‘I had to voat no kynd of fents’ for example, as an expression of no confidence.
After two years I had five hundred pages in which too many people were running around over too much geography; the story wanted to be lean and spare, very concentrated; so I went back to Page One, started over, soldiered on for three and a half more years, and in 1979 on Guy Fawkes Day (auspicious, I thought) RiddleyWalker declared itself done and began to let go of me. I was a good speller before I wrote that book; I no longer am but I can live with that.
A final word about my friend with the hooked nose and the hunch: Mr Punch has appeared at my house twice in shows performed by the great Percy Press, now dead, and Percy Press Jr. The look of Punch and the sound of his swazzle* voice, the whole rampant idea of him stayed with me through five and a half years of revisions and rewrites; it is with me still. ‘He’s so old he can’t die,’ Percy told me. ‘He’s a law unto himself.’ He’s certainly a reliable performer, and Riddley Walker would be a poor show without him.
Acknowledgments
On March 14th, 1974 I visited Canterbury Cathedral for the first time and saw Dr E. W. Tristram’s reconstruction of the fifteenth-century wall painting, The Legend of Saint Eustace. This book was begun on May 14th, 1974 and completed on November 5th, 1979.
Thanks are due to Dennis, Pamela, and Clare Saunders of Canterbury; to Percy Press, Percy Press junior, Fred Tickner, and Bob Wade of the British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild; to Stuart McRae and Pa
ul Burnham of Wye College (the map is based on one sketched for me by Paul Burnham); and to Hans Kruuk of the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology in Banchory.
For much encouragement and many useful talks I am indebted to Leon Redler, Jonathan Lewis, Richard Holt, John Gordon, and my wife, Gundula. I thank my sons Jake and Ben for being good company during many working hours. I am particularly grateful to Leon Garfield, who put aside his own work to read new drafts whenever I asked him to; his responses invariably put me in better touch with what I was doing and his comments were always of practical value.
And to Tom Maschler, my publisher, who’s game for anything and always generates a sympathetic electricity that helps the work along, my thanks.
R.H.
Glossary
A Short Guide to Riddleyspeak
As much as possible I tried for more than one meaning in the words. For example, when Riddley says, on page 8, ‘I wer the loan of my name’ he means that he is the lone carrier of his name, living on borrowed time. Life among his people is usually hard and short.
Some words that look strange will explain themselves when sounded out; others may require a little more work. This is a sampling to help the reader.
arga warga: Onomatopoeia suggestive of gobbling-up.
axel: ‘Axel rate’ means accelerate.
batcherd: Badger.
Berstin Fyr: Explosives. Note that the Eusa Story is written in an archaic form of the demotic current in Riddley’s time. This is because language went through a near-total breakdown in a dark age after the destruction of civilisation.
Blobs: ‘Blobs your nunkel.’ This comes from ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ old slang meaning ‘Everything is perfect’ or ‘That wraps it up.’ ‘Blob’ in this case is suggestive of the mutations of the Eusa folk.