When I was five years old, I had three homes. The first was my actual home, in the small North-Eastern town of Yarm, where I lived and went to school. The second was my grandmother’s bungalow in the Middlesbrough suburb of Acklam, which provided a cosy weekend haven. The third was the desert planet Tatooine, on the outer rim of the galaxy, whose rolling landscape of sand dunes, moisture farms and seedy spaceports I knew just as intimately as any of its real-life counterparts. In my head, I was Luke Skywalker: and a journey to the Stockton Autoparts shop in my dad’s battered Triumph Toledo was, essentially, a ride in a runaway landspeeder, bullseyeing Womp Rats on the dusty track to Beggar’s Canyon. 1970s motorcyclists were blank-faced Imperial Stormtroopers, and the family dogs on the back seat were Wookies manning the laser cannons.
Such was the seismic impact of Star Wars on the psyche of 1970s children. It was an impact also clearly felt by artist and writer Richard Littler, the twisted genius in charge of communications from the dystopian realm of Scarfolk, and I’m very grateful to Richard for contributing our latest Felt Trips feature: the contents of this carefully-preserved childhood journal…
Over to you, Richard…
“I wrote my first book when I was six years old. Kind of. I’d seen Star Wars for the first time in early 1978 and like many children at the time I was soon an avid disciple. In the days before home video we had to sate our hunger for everything Star Wars by amassing toy figures, comics, bed linen, wallpaper, abridged ‘Story Of’ records, party accessories, and school stationery.
I had a school satchel full of the latter, including C-3PO’s Exercise Book, which I completely filled with Star Wars related drawings and texts. It started out as a catalogue of the Topps Star Wars bubble gum cards I had collected, but I didn’t actually own that many. I completed that task by the end of the first page and was left wondering what to do with the rest of the book.
So the remainder of this slender volume contains my versions of excerpts from The Star Wars Storybook, published by Collins/Armada – and newly acquired by me – in the April of that year. Additionally, there are mini-stories and character biographies that I had written myself, based on my sometimes erroneous memories of having seen the film only once. For example, I recalled incorrectly that Princess Leia had inserted the Death Star plans into R2D2 on the Millennium Falcon…
The difference between the writing styles is glaringly obvious. Suffice it to say that sentences such as ‘Stormtrooper a kind of robot what can fight in war’ and ‘Chewbacca […] was brawt into war if a stormtrooper tryed to kill him he cuold bash them very hard’ do not feature in the Collins/Armada publication.
When I rediscovered and opened my Star Wars exercise book decades later, I found tiny white and coloured fragments of the rubber I had used, caught in the book’s central gutter. I’m almost sure it was a Luke Skywalker eraser, and I know I will have been conflicted over whether to use it or not: every Star Wars item to a six-year-old fan was a treasure – a holy relic – and to deface it would have been an act of heresy.”
Thanks Richard. The force will be with you… always.
Except on Tuesdays, when it only works a half day.
Felt Trips is a collaborative effort. If anyone wants to contribute their own childhood drawings from the era, I would be utterly delighted – please drop me a line using the “Contact” link at the top of the page. A good quality scan would be perfect, but – if not – then a clear photo of your artwork, lying flat, is fine. And maybe a few words of explanation, too: when the drawings were done, how old you were, what inspired you to tackle those particular subjects? Thanks so much.
The Haunted Generation 