“I wasn’t getting myself all upset,” said Jim, who clearly was.
“Well, don’t. Soap is confused. Geraldo is confused.”
“Both of them?”
“Both of them. Lennon did survive, the Queen did not. That’s history and you can’t change history, can you?”
“Well …” said Jim. “I suppose not.”
“You definitely can’t. History cannot be changed.”
The invasion of the body snatchers.
The thing from Planet Z.
The big-eyed beans from Venus.
The fiend without an ’ead.
The wild wild women of Wonga.
Morris the human mole.
Loup Garou.
The man from the Pru.
The beast from the bottomless hole.
The phantom of the opera.
The lad from the Black Lagoon.
Vampires and umpires and pirates and poets,
The Scotsman who lives on the moon.
Turned up on my doorstep yesterday,
To say that they’d put up my rent.
I said, curse and damnation
(They had an Alsatian),
And that’s why I live in a tent.
6
Norman Hartnell[4] once said that life would be a whole lot easier if it could be lived in little movies. The gist of this was that life nowadays is simply too complex for the average man to get his average head around. There’s too much going on all at the same time. Too many plot-lines, if you like, weaving in and out and all round about. If you could live your life in little movies, each with a beginning, a middle and an end, you could concentrate on one thing at a time. Enjoy each for whatever it was and give of your best to each in turn.
And things of that nature.
Generally.
Norman considered that, ideally, each little movie would last for a week. You would begin whatever particular enterprise you chose to begin, on the Monday. Give it your absolute and undivided attention until Friday (by which time it would have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion), and then you’d have the weekend off to plan what you should do the following week.
Norman was what is called “an Idealist”.
He was also a corner-shopkeeper.
And a single man.
Norman’s shop was known to the good folk of Brentford as The Sweetie Shop that Time Forgot. Norman had inherited the shop from his father, Norman Hartnell Senior (whom many at the time had confused with the other Norman Hartnell), way back in the nineteen sixties and had done his best to keep it just the way it was.
This was not for the sake of nostalgia, or as some posthumous tribute to his daddy. It was simply that Norman liked the shop the way it was and could think of no sound reason for changing it. The shop served as Norman’s base of operations, where he applied himself not only to living his life in little movies, but also to his hobby.
For Norman, Idealist, corner-shopkeeper and single man, was also an inventor.
England has proudly given birth to many a great inventor. It has also, almost without exception, failed to capitalize on this. Inventors have found themselves unable to raise finance to develop their ideas and have inevitably sold them abroad.
The reason for this, in Norman’s opinion, was that those who sat in the seats of power, those big seats in Whitehall with red leather backs, tried to do too much at once and so did everything badly. They missed opportunities because they didn’t live their lives in little movies.
Norman had written to them explaining this, but so far had received no reply.
Which, in his opinion, proved his point.
So Norman did not waste his precious time sending off details of his latest revolutionary invention to the big-seat-sitters of Whitehall. He applied himself to solving local problems. To improving the lives of those who lived around him.
Idealist, shopkeeper, single man, inventor and very nice fellow was he.
This week Norman was building a horse.
It was to be a surprise present for Jim Pooley, who was a good friend of Norman’s. Jim was the only man that Norman knew of, other than himself, who actually lived his life in little movies. True, Jim’s little movies were always repeats. In fact they were always the very same movie. The one about the bloke who spends all his time trying to win on the horses but always fails to do so. It was a very dull little movie and it didn’t have a happy ending.
But Norman meant to change all that for Jim. He was doing what inventors do. Which is to identify the problem and provide the simple solution.
Over the previous weekend Norman had identified the problem. Jim never won much money on the horses, because they were not his horses, and so he could never know for certain whether they would win or not. Therefore the solution was to provide Jim with a horse that could be guaranteed to win.
The answer was therefore to build Jim a horse.
It might well have been suggested to Norman that the answer would be to buy Jim a horse. But Norman would certainly have pooh-pooed this suggestion.
Racehorses cost a fortune to buy. It was simpler all round just to build one.
Norman had recently come into possession of a scientific magazine, ordered in error by a customer. In this there had been a long and involved article about a sheep called Dolly, which had supposedly been cloned. This had set Norman thinking.
Like all manly men, all truly manly men, Norman had a love of science fiction. Not just a liking, but a love. And there was no shortage of novels dedicated to this particular subject. Norman had rootled about in his collection and come up with a couple of Johnny Quinn classics. Crab Cheese and The Man Who Put his Head on Backwards.
In Crab Cheese the eponymous detective (Crab Cheese) finds himself on the trail of a serial killer of the vampire persuasion, who turns out to be a human clone. The cunning twist at the end is that the man does not have a soul. The theory being that you might be able to clone the man, but you cannot clone the soul[5].
This gave Norman pause for thought. Did animals have souls? No one really knew for certain. But then if they did, and the one you cloned didn’t, would it really matter? Norman wondered about Dolly. Had she shown any leanings towards vampirism? If she had, the scientific journal failed to mention them.
The Man Who Put his Head on Backwards was a different kettle of genetics altogether. It involved rich people in the future who were cloned by their parents at birth. The clones were then carefully reared on special farms to provide spare parts and replacement organs for the originals. As and when required.
This led Norman into wondering whether he should perhaps clone half a dozen horses in case the first one broke a fetlock or something.
But he decided to scrub around that. He only had space in his back yard to graze one horse and he didn’t want the neighbours complaining again.
What a fuss they’d made about his outside toilet. It had seemed such a good idea at the time, catering as it did to customers who were suddenly caught short in his shop. The world had clearly not been ready for the open-air female urinal.
So, over the aforementioned previous weekend Norman had set himself to planning how he might clone the greatest Derby winner of them all. It would need to have all the best features of all the best horses all rolled into one. But how to go about the task? How to acquire the necessary genetic material? You couldn’t just knock at the door of some stud farm and ask to borrow a few skin scrapings. Well, you could, but …
Well, you could in a manner of speaking. You could certainly ask for something.
On the Sunday Norman drove off to Epsom in his Morris Minor. He set out early and sought the grandest-looking stables. Here he leaned upon the fence and watched the horses being groomed. He had brought with him two essential items. A breeder’s guide and a bucket. These were all he needed to gain the something he required.
4
He was never confused with the other Norman Hartnell, because no one could remember who the other Norman Hartnell was.