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Lungbarrow - Notes
Page 1
Prologue
You can find a quote in Shakespeare to fit most things, but the \x91abysm of time\x92 line from The Tempest seemed absolutely right here. The Tempest is also Shakespeare\x92s last play and Prospero is another magical figure and arch-manipulator, not unlike the Doctor. Maybe he is a Doctor, 12th or 13th generation. Now there\x92s a thought. They do say that if Shakespeare was alive today, he\x92d be writing for television...
The Other\x92s garden is reminiscent of the rose garden in which we see the First Doctor, Hartnell in Three Doctors and Hurndall in Five Doctors. It also reappears as the Doctor\x92s imaginary garden in Auld Mortality.
According to Cat\x92s Cradle: Time\x92s Crucible, the Gallifreyans of the Old Time were all linked by telepathy. There was a continuous commentary in their heads reflecting the communal mood and public opinion. A bit like a telepathic chatroom. By the Doctor\x92s time, that ability has declined to a mere remnant of its past, but it still exists within families. The Doctor and Susan were supposed to have a degree of telepathic empathy. The Doctor\x92s Cousin Innocet has strongly developed powers. And the living House is in telepathic sympathy with its Housekeeper. And, of course, the TARDIS has telepathic circuits.
Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel were especially proud of the Hand of Omega, because it was old, battered and believable. Not the star spangled stuff of most tv science fiction.
\x93Eighth Man Bound\x94 first appeared in Lawrence Miles\x92s Christmas on a Rational Planet. It\x92s a game played by students on Gallifrey, in which they foresee their possible future lives. The rhyme in Chris\x92s head seems to list the Doctor\x92s lives so far. The Doctor couldn\x92t see beyond his seventh generation, and it worries him...
The scene with Badger is a bit of an info-dump to set up the location and family. But it also harks back to those magical childhoods in classic children\x92s books. The start of a Big Adventure. It\x92s very C.S. Lewis and Arthur Ransome. All old houses and schoolrooms and sunlight. I thought it was the sort of childhood that the Doctor should have had. Even if he does look about twenty.
Badger is essentially the Doctor\x92s first companion. When we needed a visual
reference for the original book cover, I asked Mike Tucker to come up with a
design. Mike, bless him, turned up on my doorstep with a complete plasticine
maquette, rams horns, dangling eye and all. The Virgin cover design was a bit
slimline compared to the original, but Daryl Joyce has gone back to the original
for his wonderful illustrations here. Badger\x92s zigzag fur comes from one of the
skins worn by an Outler in The Invasion of Time.
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Chapter 1
Paris Cubed
The Paris branch of Marks & Spencers closed early in 2001, so I just got away with that one! WARNING! FASCINATING FACT ALERT: But if you go to Woolworths in South Africa, you\x92ll notice that it\x92s a bit more up-market than Woolworths in Britain. The product range is all M&S. Strange but incontrovertible truth that alternative universes do exist... sort of.
If Doroth\xE9e was partying at the Cafe Momus on Christmas Eve in 19th century Paris, she might well find that the rowdy people at the next table who keep singing loudly are Mimi, Rudolfo and friends, the protagonists of La Boheme in Act 2 of Puccini\x92s opera.
George Seurat, whom Doroth\xE9e, true to NA form, is planning a fling with, is the French pointilliste painter (1859-1891.) His paintings are made up of thousands of points of colour. In Stephen Sondheim\x92s musical Sunday in the Park with George, which I love, Seurat\x92s mistress is called Dot. Sorry, I couldn\x92t really resist.
Robert Holmes\x92 Gallifrey is a cross between a comfortable gentlemen\x92s club
and the Vatican, and I\x92ve always seen that as my role model for the Capitol.
It\x92s so ancient it creaks. If society stopped, the on-going rituals would take
centuries to wind down. There\x92s a Byzantine proliferation of guilds, societies
and strangely named officials, all stabbing each other in the back. Most of the
workers have the factually analytical minds of cataloguers, filled with a
fascination for the detail of other people\x92s events. They observe the Universe,
annotating and revising their notes, while their leaders are locked in an
endlessly shifting, complex and stately dance of power.
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3
Chapter 2
A Long Shadow
Almoner Crest Yeux is pronounced Yooks.
Leela: what did she see in Andred? Why would she give up travelling with the Doctor? (We\x92re talking about the character, not about Louise Jameson leaving.) The parts of Gallifrey she witnessed in Invasion of Time would hardly encourage her to stay. Maybe she recognised kindred spirits in the Outlers? Or mistook the grandeur and pomposity for some sort of mystical haven? Not very likely.
I suppose Andred is the only attractive and vaguely sparky person she comes across, but really Leela\x92s whole departure is a tagged on afterthought. Better to look at how a practiced warrior and woman of action would cope in such a potentially deadly dull place. So she\x92s bored and the Doctor, the most important and influential person in her existence, has gone. What else do you expect her to do, other than dig up his past?
Romana returned to Gallifrey from E-space in Terrance Dicks\x92 Blood Harvest. By the time we get to Paul Cornell\x92s Happy Endings, she has been elected as Lord High President. She\x92s a lovely character to write, by turn authoritative and frivolous. Lalla Ward stamped all through her like Brighton rock.
Leela doesn\x92t know the name for the striped pig-bear creature she encounters
in the Gallifreyan forest, but it might be to Badger what brown bears are to our
own domesticated teddies.
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Chapter 3
Talking To Yourself
In the original book, this used to be Chapter 4.
We\x92ve seen the TARDIS bathroom before, but somewhere, I like to think, there is also a glass roundel through which you can see all the Doctor\x92s washing going round and round. One of the old Audio Visual plays, which featured Nick Briggs as the Doctor, ended with the Doctor in the bath and his plastic duck laughing at him in a chipmunky, Pinky and Perky, speeded up voice sort of way. I liked that a lot, so it\x92s here too.
The two Aces - I wanted a sequence which would get Doroth\xE9e to come to terms with what she had become. If there had been another season on tv, Ace would only have had a couple more stories. As it was, her character stayed on into the book range and developed a long way further than anyone would have suspected. She grows up, becomes a bit of a maneater, leaves the Doctor, has a stint as a fighter in the Dalek Wars, comes back to the Doctor, and lands up living in 19th century Paris, able to commute through time using a time-travelling motorbike which belonged to Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart (black female descendant of the Brigadier!) So Doroth\xE9e and Ace have a night in with a bottle - one of those nights in where you start playing Truth or Dare and talking about forbidden subjects which always lead to trouble.
In the tv days, Ace\x92s surname was Gale, as suggested by her creator, Ian Briggs. Then in the books it got turned into McShane, or Gale-McShane, or Gale again. It\x92s a bloody minefield out there. Maybe the kidnapped Parisian Doroth\xE9e is McShane and her carbine-wielding tormentor is Ace Gale...
A Marsh Dalek appears in The Dalek Book, published in time for Christmas 1964. I really liked the Marsh Daleks and used to draw lots of pictures of them instead of doing my maths homework - they were lot easier to draw than the normal Daleks. They were quite sleek, resembling a sort of tin can on stilts with few external features apart from an eye and a gun, and they patrolled wetland areas on the planet Gurnian where ordinary Daleks couldn\x92t go and kept the two-headed Horrokon monsters in order. I\x92m not entirely sure why they couldn\x92t just send a hoverbout patrol.
The Great Gates of the Past or Future, under which the future slides or the
past emerges, depending on which side you\x92re standing, first featured in Time\x92s
Crucible. Plot dynamics so far prevent me from revealing who the woman in brown
and the old harpy with an eypatch actually are.
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Chapter 4
All Fall Down
So here we are at last in the House of Lungbarrow. Many people have compared the House to Mervyn Peake\x92s Gormenghast, and I\x92d be the last person to deny any influence there. I love Peake\x92s work very much, not just the Titus Groan trilogy, but the charming and quirky Mr Pye and a lot of Peake\x92s poems and his illustrations.
Both Houses are huge edifices that ramble for miles, as much characters in their stories as any of their inhabitants. Both Houses are prisons. But there are big differences too. Gormenghast is essentially a dead place, whose denizens perpetuate its endless rituals as if they might cease to exist if they stopped. But Lungbarrow is alive and an active participant in events. It\x92s possessive of its inhabitants. It suffers from family pride in extremis. It has a violent temper and will sulk for centuries on end. To walk along its passages is truly to walk on egg shells.
In the early days of working on Lungbarrow - the script, I put a note on the latest draft I was sending to Andrew Cartmel: \x93The furniture is getting increasingly predatory.\x94 Followed by the direction \x93The Drudges are herding tables into the Great Hall.\x94 I doubt the scene later on where the Doctor \x93surfs\x94 on a runaway table could ever have been realised properly in studio, but that was the start of the House\x92s character evolution. And the book allowed me to give full range to that. There are certainly elements of Beauty And The Beast here - not just the Disney version, but the ravishing Cocteau film before it.
As to the family? Well, families get everywhere. Not just the inevitable Groans and their retainers, but equally Robert Graves\x92 Claudian family poisoning and politicking their way through Roman history; the completely batty Starkadder family from Stella Gibbons\x92 gloriously funny Cold Comfort Farm - forget the softened up tv version, read the original. Even The Archers. All soaps are filled with slightly crazy families, but any family would go mad if they had to live in the circumstances inflicted on the Lungbarrovians. Worse than Albert Square. You don\x92t have to be mad to live in a soap opera, but it helps! One of the points of the book is: how could any family cope if the Doctor was a close relative?
Most Lungbarrovians cope by playing games, but over the years, decades, centuries, the games have got progressively more bizarre and deadly. You\x92re given thirteen lives to start with... But in Lungbarrow, what else is there to do except be beastly to each other?
Cousins so far:
Cousin Arkhew, is a rather put upon little chap; the
gullible one who always gets the short straw when it comes to dirty jobs.
Cousin Owis is a bit of a sad Billy Bunter - not very nice, certainly quite dim. But extremely significant.
Cousin Glospin, the Doctor\x92s arch-rival. In a surprising family trait, the \x93young\x94 Glospin seems to bear more than a passing Byronic resemblance to Paul McGann.
Cousin Innocet, the House\x92s moral minority, still possesses a remnant of the old Gallifreyan telepathy. In the Old Time, women were taller than the men and Innocet is tall and proud like her forebears. It\x92s likely that the very tall body that Romana tries on before regenerating into Lalla Ward, is another throwback to the tall seer women of the Old Time - well, it could be! Innocet\x92s long, long hair may have roots (ha!) in Rapunzel or Maeterlinck\x92s Melisande or the braided Bride in the Stravinsky/Nijinska ballet Les Noces, but its weighty symbolism is entirely different and nothing to do with the loss of innocence. One day, Innocet will be Lungbarrow\x92s Housekeeper, until then she keeps her journal and builds houses out of circular playing cards.
Cousin Jobiska: Edward Lear\x92s Pobble Who Had No Toes had an Aunt Jobisca who gave him to drink lavender water tinged with pink. When a close relative of mine was suffering from advanced Alzheimer's and had to go into Hellingly Hospital, a giant rambling NHS institution in rural East Sussex, there was a tiny and very sweet old lady on his ward, who constantly said \x93Take me home, dear. I want to go home.\x94 Bless her, I don\x92t think she really remembered where home was. It seemed to change on a weekly basis, rather like Jobiska\x92s age. Hellingly, with its gothic architecture and warren of corridors, was yet another inspiration for Lungbarrow. It was closed in the cutbacks, a lot of patients went back to the community (maybe some got into government) and the place is now something like luxury flats. The House of Lungbarrow would not have stood for that.
The God of Pain is one of the old Gallifreyan Gods, aka the Menti Celesti, who could also be Eternals (Enlightenment.) They turn up throughout the New Adventures, most notably Time (as the Doctor was her champion) and Death. I had to coordinate the writing of Lungbarrow with Kate Orman, whose Room With No Doors was the previous book in the series. I rang Kate in Sydney and she was in the middle of her birthday dinner. After we\x92d both stopped going \x93Oh, my God!\x94 at each other, she pointed me towards a painting, The Death of Arthur by J.G. Archer, which shows the dying King Arthur laid on a seashore, tended by three queens before he\x92s ferried off to Avalon. Kate saw the three women as the embodiment of the Gallifreyan Gods - Red/black for Death, white for Pain and an unfixed shifting colour for Time. Bizarrely I knew the picture and had already used it in the novelisation of Battlefield. Things, like Gallifreyan clocks, run in complex interlocking circles.
And talking of Gallifreyan clocks... The arrival of the TARDIS sends out
ripples, toppling Innocet\x92s house of cards and setting frozen time in the House
moving again. And poor old Arkhew is trapped in the orrery-like clock as all the
planets and orbits, representing space and legend, start to activate around him.
The Doctor, of course, insists he doesn\x92t believe in omens.
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6
Chapter 5
Disturbing The Dust
Lungbarrow\x92s attic is like a fairy tale forest. The giant furniture recalls when we are little and can only just see over the top of the table at what Mum is doing for tea. I once saw an opera production in which a character regressed to childhood, dreaming she was ascending to Heaven. In answer to this, a white staircase at the side of the stage was suddenly replaced by a giant version of the same staircase. The character became a child again, climbing this mountainous slope one big step at a time. It was an unforgettable and radiant image. Lungbarrow\x92s not so radiant, but you get the idea...
In the original version, it was Ace who went through the looking glass into the House\x92s past. As a visual reference, I copied the Tenniel illustration of Alice climbing over the mantle into the glass and substituted our Perivale heroine with her Ace jacket on.
When I worked at Woodlands at BBC White City, our open-plan office was right next to the reference library. One lunchtime I found an old copy of Spotlight from the 1930s with a portrait of a young and dapper comedy actor called Billy Hartnell. I\x92d suggested we use it as a basis for a framed picture which the Doctor would uncover and hurriedly hide again in fright.
The garden itself is another Gallifreyan timepiece with the statue of Rassilon as its centre.
The Drudges are the ultimate evolved form of Lungbarrow\x92s furniture. Living wooden servants who tend to the day-to-day needs of the House. We had debates in the tv production office as to whether they should be male or female. Ben suggested (it\x92s always Ben) that they should be one of each, but you\x92d never be quite sure which was which. At this point, Ace had dubbed them Grim and Grimmer. I\x92d always seen them as fearsome wooden Victorian governesses, but Daryl Joyce\x92s illustrations show them as quite beautiful objects. Which is, of course, quite correct. Why should furniture be ugly?
In this flashback, Cousin Glospin is a lot older than he was in Chapter 4.
And he\x92s a lot younger too. Gallifreyan families are a nightmare.
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Chapter 6
Mingling
This gathering is one of those hatched, matched, dispatched occasions, when you get to see all those distant aunties who you normally avoid and barely remember to exchange Christmas cards with. There\x92s something of those Forsyte family gatherings in this too - everyone being frightfully superior, whilst still gossiping about the latest family scandal. Basically most of the Cousins know there\x92s trouble in the offing and are there to enjoy the show.
There are various units of Gallifreyan currency throughout the NAs. Pandaks
are named after one of the Presidents named Pandak, of whom Deadly Assassin
tells us there have been at least three. Not unlike the French Louis.
Page 8
Chapter 7
Darkrise
I often have an actor in my head when I\x92m writing a part. Occasionally I\x92ve been lucky and actually got the actor in question, but it just helps both me, and maybe the director, to nail down the type of character. In the late 1980s for Lungbarrow, I was thinking of the late Patricia Hayes, all wiry and with a fearsome energy, as Satthralope, Michael Maloney as the charming, but deeply nasty young version of Glospin (who has mysteriously turned into a McGann lookalike in the book) and I fantasised that Peter Cushing might be lured out of retirement to play Quences. These days, I\x92d kill for Leslie Phillips. Innocet, I saw as Angela Down, who\x92d been so genuinely lovely as Princess Maria in the BBC\x92s War and Peace. Today I\x92d go straight for the very wonderful Gina McKee. Alternatively, these days I\x92d be tempted to insist that all the Cousins were played by the League of Gentlemen, with Mark Gattis as a magnificent Auntie Val sort of Innocet.
Cousin Satthralope: The housekeeper is the medium between the House and its inhabitants. She\x92s in telepathic empathy with the living building, responsible for the rituals and day-to-day running of the place and the Drudges are her servants. She embodies the House\x92s possessiveness and sense of familial duty. There\x92s a remnant of the ancient female Pythian rulers of Gallifrey in her role.
Ordinal-General Quences: The Kithriarch, head of the Family. The elderly
parent who only wants the best for his offspring. He recognised the Doctor\x92s
potential long ago and had a career all mapped out for his protege.
Unfortunately the Doctor had his own ideas... An alternative Quences turns up in
Chapter 8
Fragments
This chapter starts with a collage of word pictures representing the
aftermath of the House\x92s actions. Maybe it comes from watching so much tv when I
was younger, but my prose writing does seem to be very visual. In fact, I knew
the stories of many literary classics, not because I\x92d read them, but because
I\x92d seen them on the telly. I did go and read quite a lot of them afterwards,
but even as I read the books, I\x92d see the characters from the tv version.
Patrick Troughton, magnificently evil as Quilp, Alan Badel as The Count of Monte
Christo, Frank Finlay as Jean Valjean. A Disney film version of any story or
fairytale tends, for good or bad, to eclipse any other interpretation. But even
on audio, I still find myself trying to create extraordinary sights; sights that
the telly could never afford. These days I watch precious little television. All
presenters who believe they\x92re more important than the programme they\x92re
presenting should be sentenced to watch endless loops of lifestyle programmes.
And one particular garden designer, who prefers concrete to plants, should have
been strangled at birth by a clematis.
The Doa-no-nai-heya Monastery is the retreat featured in the previous book in
the NA series, Kate Orman\x92s Japanese epic The Room With No Doors.
For this version of the book, I\x92ve hacked out most of the second half of the
original Chapter 8. There was a cringe-making overload of information there,
showing what the Doctor got up to while Chris was unconscious, and it was
totally unnecessary to the plot. So it went. Chapter 9
The Whitewood House
Gallifreyan nursery rhymes seem to be gloomy things that mourn the loss of
the children. It\x92s all down to guilt. Children were so long ago that they\x92ve
become the stuff of fairytale and legend.
The Drudges seem to have forgotten their place in the hierarchy. As maids,
they are supposed to serve the Family, but since the House took things into its
own \x93hands\x94, they behave more like prison warders. The House has decided that it
knows best, rather like high street banks that forget they are the public\x92s
servants.
After six years working in catering during the seventies, you\x92d think I have
gone off kitchens, but I still like them a lot. They\x92re the heart of any home.
Things, both wonderful and weird, happen in kitchens. Chefs chase junior cooks
with live lobsters. The kitchen staff are at permanent war with the waiters. The
waiters live on a diet of filched oysters and smoked salmon. And I can\x92t even
tell you what I once saw in the dry food store in a seafront hotel in Southsea.
Fawlty Towers only skims the surface, believe me. The things that other people
have in their larders is just as fascinating as what they have on their book or
video shelves. And what the Lungbarrow kitchen has in its larder is not quite so
far from other kitchens as you\x92d like to think.
I like the fact that the Doctor is extremely cagey about admitting that he
knows where he is. It puts a strain on his friendship with Chris, who behaves
with utmost decency throughout. I\x92m all for a bit of antagonism between the
regular characters. God knows, they live on top of each other enough, barrelling
through harrowing situations which hardened troops would need counselling for. I
love it when Barbara calls the First Doctor a stupid old man; when the Second
Doctor deliberately has a row with Jamie about rescuing Victoria from the
Daleks; or when Nyssa doesn\x92t tell the Fifth Doctor that she\x92s spoken to Adric
in Castrovalva. You could write a whole book about Tegan\x92s paranoias, and the
Seventh Doctor has those little disagreements with Ace in Ghost Light and The
Curse of Fenric. Chris Cwej is a really nice guy, but his trust of the Doctor is
at odds with his training as an Adjudicator, which means he can\x92t help but have
a highly suspicious mind.
Innocet is such a stickler for tradition that she even puts on her hat and
coat for a trip up the corridor. People will do anything to cling on to the
past. But really she\x92s quite literally shouldering all the blame and guilt in
the House. If she\x92s not careful, she\x92ll land up an unsung martyr.
Chapter 10
Good Day For Mushrooms
I\x92ve always had a soft spot for mushrooms ever since the sixties when a
Russian spy, captured retrieving top secret information from a tree stump in
somewhere like Ashdown Forest, insisted he was only looking for fungi. \x93I\x92m only
picking mushrooms\x94 became a school catch phrase. Rather like the slogan on a
sheer nylon tights offer with Paxo stuffing: \x93Recommended by Anita Harris.\x94 But
I digress...
There\x92s a sense that both the Doctor and Chris are getting out of their
depth. Wouldn\x92t it just be better to get the TARDIS back and go? But curiosity,
always the Doctor\x92s undoing, and a man in a stove get the better of them.
They\x92re starting to get noticed.
The Doctor\x92s catapult, emblem of a rascally Dennis the Menace-style
childhood. But I don\x92t remember knowing anyone who actually had one.
Any resemblance by the \x93whisper softly\x94 nursery verse to \x93Christopher Robin
is saying his prayers\x94 is purely deliberate.
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