22-28 NOVEMBER 1980

Hordes of the Things Tuesday Radio 4UK

Before time began, when football hooligans hadn't been invented, the forces of Good and Evil battled it out at the Albion. No laughing matter, you say, but that hasn't stopped APR Marshall and JHW Lloyd producing a four-part comedy series. TORQUIL GANDERBRACKETT found the authors in Darkest Wiltshire

 

Lords of the Things

To the casual and uninformed observer, 'Tiny Eagles' appears to be just another rambling stone cottage framed by the elegant magnolia trees of the Wiltshire Downs. I can exclusively reveal that it is in fact a 12-storey Moorish castle with colossal arabesque crenellations, a 46-acre moat and a stove on the roof.

Appearances can be deceptive, as anyone who thinks they have fleetingly glimpsed, in a dark library, the strange, magical-and completely unpublished-books of APR Marshall and JHW Lloyd knows.

I felt a little apprehensive and suitably humble as I struck the giant gong beside the drawbridge. APR Marshall and JHW Lloyd were, I judged, in their high 70s. Though Marshall was smoking quietly in the drawing-room armchair, Lloyd was positively aglow and telephoning the fire brigade.

Marshall is tall, shock-haired and stooping, whereas Lloyd is swarthy, stoop-haired and shocking. They stood with their backs to shelf upon shelf of volumes. 1 reflected that they had more than 300 best-selling books behind them.

They met in 1934. Marshall was a brilliant young archaeologist working on tomb-scrapings strangely north of Calcutta; Lloyd was a brilliant young linguist researching adverbs at the University of Vermont. Meeting by chance one evening at Lytton Strachey's house in the Galapagos Islands, they began immediately on their first book.

They worked incessantly, Lloyd feverishly noting down ideas in what he called his 'writing' and Marshall crossing them out again with what he called his 'sense of humour'.

Their draft completed, and eager for advice, they journeyed in 1939 to Oxford, to the home of JRR Tolkien, or 'Stinker ' as they had impishly christened him. He loathed them on sight, and pitched tiny, poisonous cacti through the letter-box, before ordering his ferocious dwarf, 'Towser', to savage them mercilessly. Undiscouraged, they hid in his garage, shaking with fear. Nine years later they emerged, more brilliant than before, and clutching a shiny new novel in their tall, shock-haired mandibles. The rest is history.

JPR Marshall and JHW -Lloyd have created a fantasy world which children of all ages

wish they could penetrate. It is set before Time Itself began: The Elder Days after The Dawn Of The Earth. Here legend and history are one. Swords battle with sorcery, knights meet valkyries, elves and centaurs lie down with the lamb. The world is a perilous place -for it is young, enchanted and violent.

'In the beginning there was peace. But it did not last. For, on the afternoon of the First Day, there arose a Giant Nymph called Rytanufor who gathered about him all the Evil Creatures of the Night and swore to blot out utterly all Good Things upon the Earth.'

And this he did. But, by understandable nymphly error, he omitted to crush one small Kingdom called 'Albion,' before he departed to exercise his Giant Dog. Meanwhile, all around Albion swarmed the embittered Children of Darkness, malignant and deadly. The Children of Darkness numbered 27 million.

Good King Yulfric The Wise III, being a trusting monarch, scoffed at the rumours of Albion's impending doom and made firm non-aggression pacts with The Evil Flesh-Eating Lord of Craarn and the Swirling Killer-Loons of Dath. His son, the Crown Prince Veganin, is alone in seeing the mortal danger, but who is he against so many? Well, that's where Agar the apprentice woodcutter comes in ...