Terry Pratchett: a memoir

Everyone else seems to be recalling their Terry Pratchett moments, so this is mine. It’s far shorter than most, but it did have a profound effect on my career.

Head back to the late 80s, possibly the early 90s – far enough back that the exact dates become hazy.  I was still working full time as an anaesthetist at the Cambridge Vet School so it was before 1994, but after I started writing prose in 1992, so we’ve narrowed it down a bit.  It was also in the time when I thought drinking alcohol was still cool, as the accompanying photograph shows.  This is me, younger, drunker, probably having rather more fun than my sober adult self – pretending to be an elf (yes, I know) pretending to fire a pretend arrow at… Sir Terry Pratchett.

Except he wasn’t a sir, then, obviously, or one would never do such a thing (actually, that’s not true, I can’t imagine him ever worrying about fake elves firing fake arrows).  Anyway, he was course tutor on a week long writing course in the depths of Norfolk on which I was a student. I went two years in a row to this place whose name I don’t remember – but it was an Arvon equivalent down to the idea that the students cooked the meals.  Anyone who knows me will be running for cover at about this point. My mother was a chef and a master gardener, therefore I can neither cook nor garden (yes, I have a good therapist. No, these are not going to change).

So I volunteered to chop veg, which is at least within my range and unlikely actually to poison anyone and TP came in to see how we were getting on and I volunteered the fact that on the previous year’s course, tutored by the inimitable Fay Weldon, we’d played Dungeons and Dragons. And, yes, I did happen to have the entire set of D&D dice with me, from the 4-sided pyramid to the dodecahedron and yes, I might be able to DM the game, as long as he didn’t mind it being a little ad hoc.

So we had dinner and a drink. And then we explored deeper into the cottage we were in and found an entire crate of red wine, so we had another drink (later, we discovered that was the wine supply for the next 3 courses, but hey, we had fun) and we set up the game…

At which, of course, he excelled.  I have no memory of why I, as Dungeon Master, was a) playing an elf or b) why that elf should have decided to hold the local equivalent of a gun to the wizard’s head, but I imagine it seemed a jolly good reason at the time.  And obviously he survived the onslaught.  Fay Weldon said of it, that ‘with breaks for food and water and calls of nature, one could play this quite happily for the rest of one’s life’.  TP, I suspect, had already played. Certainly, he knew the rules better than I did. Or was better at making them up on the spot.

And either side of that, he read my first draft of Hen’s Teeth which I was planning to send in to the Virago first novel competition (so, actually, it must have been the autumn of 1992) and said, ‘Stop saying things we already know. If you can do that, and cut out the crap bits, here, here and… here, this will be shortlisted. It won’t win, but then that’s never the point.’  So I did.  And it was. And it wasn’t and it wasn’t and yes, it did go on to be shortlisted for the Orange Prize (in 1997, these things are never fast) and no, I didn’t make nearly enough mileage out of that.

But still.  He was unfailingly generous.  He was intelligent, humane, funny, clever, always right at the cutting edge of technology – he had a laptop when we barely had desktops) and he put a baby writer on her feet and pointed her in the right direction to venture out into the wild and woolly world of publishing, for which I am eternally grateful.

Sir Terry Pratchett, thank you.  And may you wreak havoc wherever you go and wherever you are.