Wish You Were Here (45 page)

APPENDIX TWO

Chronology of the Major Works

APPENDIX THREE

Full Credits for the Radio Series

CAST:

APPENDIX FOUR

Douglas’s Favourite Beatles’ Tracks In Order Of Preference

25 May 1999—St. John’s Gardens W11

Endnotes

*
 
¹
“Hitchhiker’s” is written in a variety of ways even by Douglas’s publishers. Scholars in millennia to come may read significance into the occasional sighting of a hyphen and the pitiable singularity of the hitchhiker. To appease my publishers, I shall endeavour to remain consistent.

*
 
²
Elaine Morgan,
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
(Souvenir Press, 1997).

*
 
³
In an article for
Esquire
magazine, reprinted in
The Salmon of Doubt
(Macmillan, 2002), Douglas notes of his nose that several speleologists had been up it, but those who had not returned became part of the problem.

*
 
⁴
“Glorious Hopes on a Trillion Dollar Scrapheap” by Dan Roberts,
Financial Times,
5 September 2001, cited in Will Hutton’s brilliant book
The World We’re In
(Little, Brown, 2002).

*
 
⁵
The Narrator, Fit the Eighth,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(Pan, 1979).

*
 
⁶
The
Eagle
(incorporating
Boy’s World
), 23 January 1965. Buffs might like to know that the
Eagle
also published Douglas’s first short story, a comic tale about a man losing his memory, on 27 February 1965.

*
 
⁷
From the 1997 Channel Four documentary called
Break the Science Barrier with Richard Dawkins.

*
 
⁸
Buffs might be interested to know that Douglas replaced this witty expression of amazement with the more conventional “mind-bogglingly” in the Narrator’s account of the Babel Fish in Fit the First. History does not record if this was pressure from the BBC, an expedient eye on the American market, or just the thought that such a graphic expression might distract.

*
 
⁹
A star is much simpler than a leaf.

*
 
¹⁰
This notion that alien life forms are not benign is, of course, common in a lot of SF and goes back to H.G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds.

*
 
¹¹
There is now some controversy about whether ancient microfossils are really indicative of life. Life may be much younger than the usual c. 3.8 billion year estimate. See “Proof of Life,”
New Scientist,
22 February 2003.

*
 
¹²
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
p. 43.

*
 
¹³
The Narrator, Fit the Sixth,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

*
 
¹⁴
The Narrator, Fit the Second,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

*
 
¹⁵
Interview with the American Atheists collected in
The Salmon of Doubt.

*
 
¹⁶
Pascal’s bet, the reader will recall, was the pusillanimous notion that being wrong about the non-existence of God carried such a potential downside that one might as well play safe on the deathbed and recant one’s atheism. In the circumstances, it would be a minor concession when set against a possible eternity of extreme discomfort.

*
 
¹⁷
Inebriated conversation in Frederick’s restaurant in Islington.

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¹⁸
Douglas’s riff on these lines was quoted movingly by Professor Dawkins at the memorial service at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 17 September 2001.

*
 
¹⁹
Preface to
Digging Holes in Popular Culture—Archaeology and Science Fiction,
edited by Mike Russell (Oxbow Books, 2002).

*
 
²⁰
Interview with Sue Lawley on
Fifty Years On
(BBC Radio Four, 24 July 2002).

*
 
²¹
The author remembers his mum getting into trouble with the neighbours in their block of council flats because she put out the washing on a Sunday.

*
 
²²
An unreliable informant reports that the condoms of the time were like the Russian
galoshki
(gumboots) of the Soviet era. He says it was “like wearing a hot-water bottle on one’s willy.”

*
 
²³
Quoted in
The Salmon of Doubt.
There is a joke that, despite the efforts of the editorial staff, will not die in the
New Scientist
magazine. It’s so-called “Nominal Determinism” whereby someone called Henrietta Bunn, for instance, is condemned to become a cake mix chemist. Douglas, given his passion for evolutionary biology, thought his initials funny, though entirely lacking any other significance.

*
 
²⁴
I am indebted to Shirley Adams, the granddaughter of Douglas’s great-grandfather’s sister, for her research into the family tree. This has many roots and branches, some huge and others tragically truncated, and it’s something I will not attempt to describe. What with infant mortality, marriage between distant cousins, and age disparities it looks as if someone quite disturbed had tried to draw the Tube map from memory. Its compilation is a truly impressive and scholarly undertaking.

*
 
²⁵
Thales of Miletus, pre-Socratic philosopher and cosmologist highly rated by Aristotle. They must have been a cultured lot, those doctors . . .

*
 
²⁶
This information derives from a talk given by John Lenihan to a meeting of the Scottish Society of the History of Medicine.

*
 
²⁷
Once again I am grateful to Shirley Adams for this information and the sight of the actual silver box containing the deeds to James’s house in Glasgow.

*
 
²⁸
Claude Curling died in 1993, but his archives are available in King’s College, London. The experience seems to have affected him deeply and he became fascinated by the ontological nature of quantum reality.

*
 
²⁹
This is a crude simplification of Anselm’s Ontological Argument, a dodgy trick for smuggling God into existence by linguistic sleight of hand.

*
 
³⁰
Demographically we’ve all gotten bigger—especially the Japanese. Even in the West you need only look at the seating in old theatres or buses. Shops for large people now sell sneakers like snowshoes and underpants on which you could show iMax movies.

*
 
³¹
Quoted in the Prologue by Nicholas Wroe in
The Salmon of Doubt.

*
 
³²
Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon and Jimi Hendrix were all sinistral. Left-handedness is on the increase (now 13% of males, 11% of females). Professor McManus of UCL believes that the genes that code for left-handedness also have a role in the development of the language centres of the brain.

*
 
³³
Douglas was fascinated by this complex question of altruism, and would recommend Matt Ridley’s excellent book,
The Origins of Virtue
(Viking, 1996), to his friends. He bought me a copy after an argumentative lunch one day.

*
 
³⁴
For true buffs here’s some info otherwise of no interest. But it’s so hard won, you’re going to be told anyway that the licence number of Christopher’s last Aston Martin, a silver DB5, was BLU 119B.

*
 
³⁵
There is a story that Douglas, Big Jane, and a small but elite group of media-fashionables including Jon Canter, the film writer, the comedian Lenny Henry, Mary Allen who ran the Opera House at Covent Garden, and several senior telly people, were sitting in the kitchen, trembling into their coffee, after one of the Adamses’ awesome parties. Little Jane came in wearing her nurse’s uniform. “Oh, Jane, Jane,” Jon Canter said with self-deprecating irony, “when will you get a
real
job?”

*
 
³⁶
This book was published by the school in 1999. A copy was kindly lent to me by old Brentwoodian, Peter Stothard.

*
 
³⁷
Michael Willis, the school’s archivist and a teacher of History and Politics, describes “good” Sir Anthony in these terms in his official history in
The Best of Days?

*
 
³⁸
See his witty essay on the subject reprinted in
The Salmon of Doubt.

*
 
³⁹
Quoted by John Marchant, retired headmaster of the Prep School, in
The Best of Days?

*
 
⁴⁰
Inspired and inspiring English teachers are the unsung heroes of modern literature. For instance, Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse—both at Dulwich College though at different times—were taught by the same person.

*
 
⁴¹
The Brentwoodian.
Douglas kept the complete run of the magazine slowly turning to coal under the weight of a lifetime’s kipple stored in giant crates. Later, when he wrote for school publications, he usually missed the deadlines by two weeks—a modest start to a lifelong habit.

*
 
⁴²
My thanks to Richard Curtis for letting me have a copy. You can forget Proust and those stupid cakes. Beatles’ songs are more potent.

*
 
⁴³
Douglas and I discussed this at the time, and we expressed surprise that the poet did not regard it as a kind of off-beat tribute. In fairness to Paul Johnstone, who I hope did not have a budding career as a poet blighted by Douglas’s reference, I suspect that he would now smile about this. If not, and you
are
Paul Johnstone by chance reading this biography, I apologize for having dragged this up again.

*
 
⁴⁴
Rather as Ian Fleming found the name of James Bond on the cover of
Birds from the West Indies and Other Caribbean Islands,
Douglas is said by some scholars of Adamsiana to have named Arthur Dent after an obscure puritan who wrote
The Plain Man’s Guide to Heaven
(1601). Douglas always denied this, but who knows what lodges in writers’ brains?

*
 
⁴⁵
PLEASE do not call it. The number now belongs to somebody quite unconnected.

*
 
⁴⁶
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
pp. 105–6.

*
 
⁴⁷
My thanks to Lesley Hall and John Kelsall for permission to quote this from
The Best of Days?

*
 
⁴⁸
Readers, the role of biographer is that of licensed nosy bastard. Douglas squirreled everything away in great crates, including Helen’s touching love letters. Are they our business? I think not. Do they cast light on Douglas? No.

*
 
⁴⁹
See the delicious photograph in
Fashions of a Decade—the 1970s
by Jacqueline Herald (Batsford, 1992).

*
 
⁵⁰
Chicken shed cleaner, hospital porter . . . Neil Gaiman’s witty book,
Don’t Panic
(Titan Books, 1987), is an excellent companion to Douglas’s work.

*
 
⁵¹
He stayed in the Youth Hostel in Reichenauer Strasse so he wasn’t living the blues all that desperately.

*
 
⁵²
Some documentary film-makers have identified the actual field, but I can’t help thinking, even with my tenacious grasp of the trivial, that the field is about as relevant as the number of the tram young Einstein thought in as he made his daily journey to the Patent Office.

*
 
⁵³
Ken Welsh, an Aussie, wrote a book full of good research and sound advice, but it hasn’t been updated since 1993 for reasons that probably have to do with the decline in hitchhiking.

*
 
⁵⁴
This story was written in 1986 for the
Utterly, Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book
and republished in
The Wizards of Odd,
edited by Peter Haining (Souvenir Press, 1996).

*
 
⁵⁵
Roger Wilmut, in his scholarly and enjoyable book
From Fringe to Flying Circus
(Eyre Methuen, 1980), quotes a source as describing the club at that time as “decidedly hearty.” For earnest historians of Footlights, the potted history by the club’s treasurer, Dr. H.C. Porter, published in the programme for the 1974 revue,
Chox,
is invaluable.

*
 
⁵⁶
Buffs might like to know that Jon Canter, a lifelong pal of Douglas, came up with Marvin’s line—“Life, don’t talk to me about life”—in a revue in 1972. Douglas always gave Jon the credit for it.

*
 
⁵⁷
When I interviewed him for this book in his chambers, he talked about Douglas warmly, with appalling energy and perfect clarity of diction, for an hour without appearing to draw breath. Sometimes personalities and jobs seem well suited.

*
 
⁵⁸
Quoted in
Don’t Panic,
p. 10.

*
 
⁵⁹
Quoted by Ben Duncan in a review for
The Times Educational Supplement,
17 March 1973.

*
 
⁶⁰
The reader might enjoy a very helpful little poem on the subject of structuralism. It goes like this:

This is the creed o’ Jacques Derrida

There ain’t no author.

There ain’t no reader, eeda.

*
 
⁶¹
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had a popular TV series on at the time,
Not Only . . . But Also,
which often featured the two of them in ominously blotched macs pretending to be members of the proletariat.

*
 
⁶²
I am grateful to Mary Allen for finding these sketches and to Will Adams and Martin Smith for letting me reproduce them here.

*
 
⁶³
John Cleese also adumbrated the Three Laws of Comedy: NO PUNS, NO PUNS, and NO PUNS.

*
 
⁶⁴
Spike Milligan’s genius was hugely influential on a generation of funny young men. However, the pain of writing the Goons was not dissimilar to the agony experienced by Douglas when struggling to fill a page with apparently effortless drollery.