Ray Bradbury

‘Hey, Ray Bradbury... you left somethin' behind…'

‘Hey, Ray Bradbury... you left somethin' behind…’  This is how Giles Diggle starts his tribute to Ray Bradbury. This is a call from the heart - and it could only come from deep within Bradbury country - where ‘The sound of tennis shoes on gravel remain…’

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 I have found my few words in praise of Ray Bradbury so difficult to write because he did have such a profound effect upon my life.

 In 1973 during Mr. Heath’s three-day week Jack Eve taught me how to paint. Jack and I worked for Rio Tinto Zinc which paid us a five day week because they got us to paint everything in the factory the other two days of the week. At 18 I was a sheet metal cut-up machine operator, and at 64, Jack was my assistant! He told me stories of his child-hood and about his time as a solider in Berlin after the war. He marveled at just how stupid I was and helped me with the crossword. He was a genuinely good man and a pleasure to work with. He witnessed me reading the books and never belittled my attempts to read.

I cycled 6 or 7 miles to work every day - in boiler suit and donkey jacket – and stopped on the way to buy cigarettes and a paper - the then socialist leaning Daily Mirror - with a reading age of 5. In the political turmoil of the time it was inevitable that the papers would go on strike and so one morning I found myself trying to find a substitute for the crossword.  There was a book stand next to where the papers should have been and on it was a book with a purple cover and a golden image in the middle which caught my eye. I picked it up, flicked through the pages found it had illustrations, and not a lot of text. The publishers blurb said it was science fiction.

 It took me over a week to read this book - mouthing the words and moving my finger along the pages – I was not a natural reader. Having left school with no qualifications I became an unskilled labourer with little future. (On one night shift I discovered that I was the only one in the tea room that had not been in prison.) With one single book Ray Bradbury changed my life. He caught me in his world, caught my imagination. It was like I had made a new friend, one who told me things in a simple way, one who showed me his humanity, integrity and honesty. The book was The Golden Apples of the Sun. It would be many years before I knew that the title of the book came from a Yeats’ poem The Song of Wandering Aengus

The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

I was an intimidating presence in the local book shop one pay day, in boots and work clothes. They were as uncomfortable with me as I was with them. I had never bought books before. I wanted Ray Bradbury books. They checked the publisher’s catalogue and were a little surprised when I ordered everything they could get and paid for it on the spot. The following week I collected eight or nine books which took me months to read - it was a real labour of love. It was here that my obsession with literature and books began. It is an enduring love. I knew there were libraries that books could be borrowed from but they were alien to me. I could not put it into words – there was so much that I could not articulate – but I wanted to keep my books, posses them- they had become like friends in themselves.  I had some new strange relationship with - books. I loved the whole object, the feel, the smell, the size, the colour, the cover.

I stopped going to the pub and clubs, I stayed at home with my new friend and read every word he had ever written and he educated me. He introduced me to Melville, Faulkner, Poe, Twain, Yeats, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and many more. I made lists of the authors and their books, and over the years I read them. Bradbury took me into many new worlds but most importantly he started me on the bewildering journey of self-awareness and articulacy. I started to understand my emotions and thoughts, started to talk to myself.

It would be my Open University lecturer Clive Thomas who would finally open the door to traditional academia for me.

It would be plain ignorance and insulting to Bradbury’s memory to consider him as merely a writer of science fiction. In many ways he was anything but a writer of science fiction. His stories and poems were so easy to read that they gave the impression that writing was easy. Many people claim that Bradbury inspired them to write - as he did me. For all the fluency and ease of style Bradbury took writing seriously and he is said to have burned more than a million words because he thought were just not good enough. His writing is genuinely worthy of the title prose-poetry. His poetic, lyrical style brought a poignancy and wistfulness to a wide range of themes. He wrote about childhood, death, fear, small town America, human aspiration. He advised NASA and Disney, he wrote about holograms, 3D TVs, theme parks - the ‘Marionette Company’ that produced ‘puppets’ that were indistinguishable from human beings - long before Asimov. He wrote about ignorance, prejudice, totalitarian régimes and politics. He wrote about the absurdity of racism and the treatment of back American people. He wrote about all the human qualities that are required for new civilizations- either on other planets or on our own in the future. In short, he wrote about the human condition.

He was a kind noble friend and teacher.

I have been fortunate to correspond with or meet writers whom I have admired over the years and I can’t understand why I never contacted Ray Bradbury to tell him how he changed my life. I regret this now. I did wonder if it would be possible to meet him when I was in America…..

Giles went on to write

 ‘Ray Bradbury was an influence and still is. In that sense he is there in my Timeline…’

Me too.

I owe him my life.  I should live it as a testimony to him.

http://gilesdiggle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/hey-ray-bradbury-you-left-somethin.html?spref=tw