“But, That’s Impossible…”
Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. by Al No
Nobody knows for sure where the river’s name comes from – only that it probably means ‘boar’. Over millennia it’s patiently sliced through the landscape forming a valley on the way. The remoteness of the valley, and the severity of the landscape, helped keep invaders away. Even if an encroaching force made inroads, this was temporary – defence came down from the mountain woods during the night and saw to that.
Both the boxes my cousin was holding were the size of hardback library books. I’d never seen anything as glorious in my brief life. One had a black and teal picture of a boy wielding a splashed white cross to protect a princess from the huge, glowering skull-head of his father behind them. The other one was weird. It had orange explosions behind a helmeted man wearing a glossy coal-suit and firing a laser. Familiar demons were scattered across the left-hand side, and the whole thing was fronted with the title - letters carved from a block of sulphur – above which floated three worried-looking heads. Both of these ‘video cassettes’ probably cost more than a car, and made up a library. I had to choose one.
In August 1813, a cave was discovered on the north-west side of the valley. Along with a floor littered with boar fragments, the cave contained twelve giant skeletons. The boar fragments were saved, and the other bones destroyed – at this time, coal was still being removed from the carcass of the earth with gunpowder. The legend of a sleeping king awaiting the signal to rise and liberate his country swept the valley with renewed vigour, but it didn’t stop the blasting.
I was a weekend adventurer in a land before time. I’m sure it must have been summer, because it was always summer before 1983. Even snow fell out of blue skies. This was a tough decision - looking back I don’t know why. Although both of the boxes contained thrilling glimpses of a past future-world, I’d only heard of one of them. Well, to be fair, I’d only seen one of them – and that one was part of the tapestry of the lives of everyone my age. As a reward for having survived another term, whole classes would assemble on squeaky wooden floors, while a man in a lab-coat that stank of aniseed set up something medieval and spinning and flashed moments of it on the wall – interspersed with public information films that improved and informed, rather than entertained. Other children would judge your social worth based on how many times you’d seen that one. And the demons that the other box contained had recently sent me screaming tearfully up at least one set of public stairs. No choice at all. But still…
The final cases of rabies occurred just down the road. The community clubbed together to send the bitten children to visit Pasteur but the adult victim wasn’t as fortunate. Rumours persist.
From the window you could just about see the bottom slopes of the mountain that housed the bone-cave and its slumbering giants – in winter they’d be ice tombs, but we didn’t have winters. I sized up the boxes again. Certainty or demon. Why couldn’t I decide?
According to legends, meeting points are thin places in the world where anything can happen. A crossroads lay next to the river that was probably named after a boar. Over the centuries, as more and more compressed mulch was dragged out of the ground, a settlement grew like a scar around the join and spread gently outwards until it reached the base of the mountains and ran out of energy.
If I’d walked out of the front door and up the road – which wasn’t going to happen when there was a film on offer, no matter how sunny it was – then I’d have reached a cul-de-sac shaped like a flint arrowhead, pointing straight up the black mountain, past King Arthur hunting boars and toward the unholy place where ‘Death Ray’ Matthews had lived. A mad scientist in a long white bungalow, surrounded with barbed wire, terrorising the locals between wars The story goes he made Shackleton talk, raised an angel over Hampstead and married an opera singer before his alchemical devilry achieved immortality in Flash Gordon’s rocket-ships. Those rocket-ships then influenced a young USC student whose failed attempt at making a Flash Gordon movie had resulted in the box without a demon.
Sometimes it’s a long way down a mountain.
The USC student was born in 1944, a year that saw the rich local soil sire two future kings of England (if Robin of Sherwood is to be believed). One of them would see fame as Rynian the Aridian much later. The other was Gimli, son of Sallah, who appeared in a history of Rome that included, to name just the alliterative: Monarch, Mavic Chen and the Master (whose mother also turned out to be a local girl).
Enough stalling. I make my selection and step through the window into the future that used to be. Ankles snap and the earth is pulled apart, mined for whatever lies deep within. With the curtains closed to hide the endless sun, the fire is closer, and burns deeper, than I could ever have imagined.
Entertainers seem to spring from the ground here: fading memories of Donald Peers and Ryan Davis rub shoulders with sin-eaters and a young man who’d help arrange the 2012 Olympics – even one of my father’s schoolmates achieved a small measure of musical success in New York during the sixties.
We’re heading home through the darkness now, back down the tarmac ribbon that stretches near the Dante-esque Merthyr Tydfil that spawned Philip Madoc. Beyond that lies the city where, decades earlier, a young designer is arriving just as Terry Nation is escaping forever.
I chose the demons.
I always will.
Dedicated to Ray Cusick and my Dad.
Both the boxes my cousin was holding were the size of hardback library books. I’d never seen anything as glorious in my brief life. One had a black and teal picture of a boy wielding a splashed white cross to protect a princess from the huge, glowering skull-head of his father behind them. The other one was weird. It had orange explosions behind a helmeted man wearing a glossy coal-suit and firing a laser. Familiar demons were scattered across the left-hand side, and the whole thing was fronted with the title - letters carved from a block of sulphur – above which floated three worried-looking heads. Both of these ‘video cassettes’ probably cost more than a car, and made up a library. I had to choose one.
In August 1813, a cave was discovered on the north-west side of the valley. Along with a floor littered with boar fragments, the cave contained twelve giant skeletons. The boar fragments were saved, and the other bones destroyed – at this time, coal was still being removed from the carcass of the earth with gunpowder. The legend of a sleeping king awaiting the signal to rise and liberate his country swept the valley with renewed vigour, but it didn’t stop the blasting.
I was a weekend adventurer in a land before time. I’m sure it must have been summer, because it was always summer before 1983. Even snow fell out of blue skies. This was a tough decision - looking back I don’t know why. Although both of the boxes contained thrilling glimpses of a past future-world, I’d only heard of one of them. Well, to be fair, I’d only seen one of them – and that one was part of the tapestry of the lives of everyone my age. As a reward for having survived another term, whole classes would assemble on squeaky wooden floors, while a man in a lab-coat that stank of aniseed set up something medieval and spinning and flashed moments of it on the wall – interspersed with public information films that improved and informed, rather than entertained. Other children would judge your social worth based on how many times you’d seen that one. And the demons that the other box contained had recently sent me screaming tearfully up at least one set of public stairs. No choice at all. But still…
The final cases of rabies occurred just down the road. The community clubbed together to send the bitten children to visit Pasteur but the adult victim wasn’t as fortunate. Rumours persist.
From the window you could just about see the bottom slopes of the mountain that housed the bone-cave and its slumbering giants – in winter they’d be ice tombs, but we didn’t have winters. I sized up the boxes again. Certainty or demon. Why couldn’t I decide?
According to legends, meeting points are thin places in the world where anything can happen. A crossroads lay next to the river that was probably named after a boar. Over the centuries, as more and more compressed mulch was dragged out of the ground, a settlement grew like a scar around the join and spread gently outwards until it reached the base of the mountains and ran out of energy.
If I’d walked out of the front door and up the road – which wasn’t going to happen when there was a film on offer, no matter how sunny it was – then I’d have reached a cul-de-sac shaped like a flint arrowhead, pointing straight up the black mountain, past King Arthur hunting boars and toward the unholy place where ‘Death Ray’ Matthews had lived. A mad scientist in a long white bungalow, surrounded with barbed wire, terrorising the locals between wars The story goes he made Shackleton talk, raised an angel over Hampstead and married an opera singer before his alchemical devilry achieved immortality in Flash Gordon’s rocket-ships. Those rocket-ships then influenced a young USC student whose failed attempt at making a Flash Gordon movie had resulted in the box without a demon.
Sometimes it’s a long way down a mountain.
The USC student was born in 1944, a year that saw the rich local soil sire two future kings of England (if Robin of Sherwood is to be believed). One of them would see fame as Rynian the Aridian much later. The other was Gimli, son of Sallah, who appeared in a history of Rome that included, to name just the alliterative: Monarch, Mavic Chen and the Master (whose mother also turned out to be a local girl).
Enough stalling. I make my selection and step through the window into the future that used to be. Ankles snap and the earth is pulled apart, mined for whatever lies deep within. With the curtains closed to hide the endless sun, the fire is closer, and burns deeper, than I could ever have imagined.
Entertainers seem to spring from the ground here: fading memories of Donald Peers and Ryan Davis rub shoulders with sin-eaters and a young man who’d help arrange the 2012 Olympics – even one of my father’s schoolmates achieved a small measure of musical success in New York during the sixties.
We’re heading home through the darkness now, back down the tarmac ribbon that stretches near the Dante-esque Merthyr Tydfil that spawned Philip Madoc. Beyond that lies the city where, decades earlier, a young designer is arriving just as Terry Nation is escaping forever.
I chose the demons.
I always will.
Dedicated to Ray Cusick and my Dad.