Riddley Walker

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 Faversham; 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) Riddley Walker 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[2] 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.

Notes

I found that I needed to write a lot of notes in order to get my head around Riddley’s world. Here are a few of them. I did some drawings of Punch too, for the same reason. I’ve reprinted the one that worked best for me.

28 May 1974

[Riddley when he was still thinking and speaking in standard English.]

No rumpa,
No durns,
No zanting
When Eusa comes.

Street Rhyme

They sing it now the same as I did when I was a child, hopping slowly and chalking the pavement: the stag and the cross and the ship, the river, the wolf and the lion and the rest of it. The Garble Time is long past, everything goes by its straight name now but the children still sing it the old way. The straight rhyme is:

No trumpets,
No drums,
No dancing
When Eustace comes.

Rumpa by now has come to mean any kind of vigorous noisemaking. Zanting is not only dancing but running, jumping, fooling and larking about in general. Children are sifters and shapers, the words they keep are mostly useful ones.

30 May 1974