Urban Gorilla by Steve Way

 

Hello all. I hope you’ll indulge me, like many contributors recently I’m up to my eyeballs and haven’t had the usual time to dedicate to this month’s blog. Also I’m thinking aloud and no doubt as usual my thoughts are confused, convoluted and no doubt far from earth shattering.

I’ve been musing about how sometimes there’s a value in not being in full possession of the facts and letting our imagination fill the gaps and how we most often do this when we’re young, being less worldly wise (though on reflection I seem to have been particularly divorced from reality.) The upshot is I’ve been wondering how we can capitalise on this not knowing in our writing for children.

In my defence it was a different era. As I was becoming a teenager I was lucky enough to read ‘Animal Farm’ before being at all politically aware, so enjoyed it the first time round almost exclusively as a story and only later understood the allegorical ramifications. At around the same time I had been roped into a band – we called ourselves ‘Rust’ which was a suitable name! – simply because I had a bass guitar, not because I could play it. The other boys were a bit older than me and actually the two leaders of the group had some talent. I never saw the words written down but they wrote a song, which I thought was called ‘Urban Gorilla’. As those were practically the only words I could understand when they sang, I enjoyed fantasising about a gorilla wandering around town (this was also before Planet of the Apes became popular.) My imaginary gorilla found it a fascinating contrast to living in the rain forest and was intrigued by everyone’s reaction on seeing it wandering down the high street. It was a lot later – and a bit disappointing - to realise that my band mates were referring to a revolutionary human guerilla!

I also spent a lot of time wondering how Lucile and her partner lamenting her loss in the song could possibly have four hundred children. Did they run some kind of gigantic foster home? Maybe the strain of looking after them all had understandably been too much for her? At least that many children could presumably harvest the ‘crops in the field’ that she had also abandoned couldn’t they? It eventually came as another disappointment to learn that she’d more realistically left four hungry children instead.

Maybe I was exceptionally naïve but I wonder if a plot or sub plot could centre around one or more children harbouring similar complete misunderstandings as I did when I was young?

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Actually, I did write one short story entitled ‘We need Trolls’ in which a girl panics when she sees this message on the family message board and wonders if her parents want some trolls to move in before she finds out that the message was about toilet rolls. It was inspired by a text from my wife when I was out at work. Thank goodness I understood that message.