You know how sometimes you remember things quite vividly,
but you’re not quite sure where from and whether you actually just made it up…?
Maybe that’s just me then…?
Anyway, recently I was thinking about hovercraft when I was
suddenly struck by the most extraordinary memory of a hovercraft story that I
once read in an annual I had when I was growing up.
A swift search on Google (other search engines are
available) was enough to make me believe
that I’d imagined the whole thing, as I couldn’t find a trace of it anywhere,
which is, of course, unusual in this day and age. As the mysterious (and
usually quite wrong) masses tend to have
you believe, “If it isn’t on the web, then it probably never existed, etc.”
which is, of course, nonsense.
Thinking about it afterwards, I realised that it was
probably in one or other of the 1960’s “Beano” Books which I had as a small boy
and which I rather unwisely swapped many years ago for a paperback copy of “The
Making of Space: 1999” which I coveted and craved at some point in the
mid-1970s.
I suspect this was a pretty poor deal, given the current
going rate for 1960s “Beano” Books, but you swaps your stuff and you makes your
choice, and sometimes you live to regret it. Perhaps those volumes lurk as a
bit of a “rainy day” nest-egg for whoever it was I made the swap with, or maybe
they just threw them in a bin twenty years ago…
Who can tell…?
Anyway, with no idea of what the story was called, or any
idea of which annual it was in, I was rather stumped, and my tentative requests
to my rather paltry list of socially-networked chums didn’t get me much
response. Then I remembered that I “followed” my local second-hand bookshop on
FizzBok, and so, on the off-chance that they might just have some in stock to
flick through, I dropped them a swift (and probably quite cheeky when you
think about it…) line, seeing as I didn’t
have any chums whom I was aware might be collectors of such things, and didn’t
really feel like paying through the nose online for a copy of the “wrong”
edition.
Anyway, they couldn’t help much, but ultimately they helped
rather a lot. I ought to explain: You see, they did put me on to a “Beano”
Comic Forum, which I was able to sign up for, after which I was able to ask the
pertinent question. Sadly, one answer came that there was a “Beano” archive out
there, but, rather unfortunately, it didn’t include the contents of the
annuals.
In the meanwhile I did some more searching and found a
Wikipedia page, which did list the contents of old “Beano” annuals, but was far
from being comprehensive. This, I presume, is because the author only has
access to whichever editions he has in his own collection, but also proves that
if you do have any other copies, there’s a gap there that is available for
filling, if you have a yen to do so.
Then I got a lucky break.
Thinking about things from another direction, I did another
search, this time for the 1966 “Beano” Book, and this conjured up another
archive, one for British Comics, which was being written out of pure love by a
keen blogger who lives out there somewhere. Written in the list of contents for
that particular volume was a story called “The Hoverclass” which seemed to be
pretty likely to be exactly the story that I had been trying to remember.
Looking into that list also rekindled so many fond memories
of all those “adventure” stories from that era; “The Iron Fish” (which I’d
almost completely forgotten about); “The Q
Bikes/Karts”; “General/Admiral Jumbo” (I SO wanted one of those aircraft
carriers even though I’d’ve looked an idiot having one in our local park); and (of course) “Billy the Cat (& Katie)” all of which has gripped my young imagination in those far off years
when I was knee-high to whatever…
Sadly, typing “The Hoverclass” into Google still didn’t get
me any further, but I was able to update my posting on the “Beano” Forum with
this vital piece of the jigsaw puzzle and this yielded spectacular results as
someone was able to inform me that there was a “Members Only” Group out there
who were archiving those old Annuals and scanning every page, and they were
able to supply me with links to the entire sixteen page story that had stuck in
my mind so vividly for all these years, despite me being unable to recall what
the name of this one-off comic strip adventure was called.
It’s mildly interesting, I suppose, that when I was finally
able to read back that story now, it all seems a little bit alarming really.
After all, being written as it was during the era of the “White Heat of New
Technology” it is a story packed full with fighter jets and snow cats and the
rather spectacular appearance of a pirate submarine (perhaps that’s where my
love of submarine stories began…?). These
are all battling our plucky band of schoolmates, who have been dragged off to
the south pole by their teacher on board a jet propelled hovercraft in search
of their missing fathers, for control of a new source of Uranium.
It could never happen now…
Anyway, the piece that I wanted to write, all about hovercraft
and other exciting technological innovations in fiction, and how they were used
to try and make school teachers appear to be far more exciting than they
otherwise might have been, the very thing which started off this train of
thought, still hasn’t been written, and perhaps never will. But at least I now
know that I wasn’t imagining things and there really was a story that I read as a small boy and which
involved a large hovercraft full of children, and a huge cake of that very
hovercraft being baked at the end…
But then, by telling you that, I’m spoiling the plot for you, aren’t I…?
I seem to remember that General Jumbo wore callipers... no, he can't have done. Thanks for reminding me of the Iron Fish. I loved that, and it made me remember a group of children who were fighting the Nazis using guns that fired needles. I have no idea which comic or when, but it is very vivid. Perhaps I dreamt it.
ReplyDeleteTalking of fighting the Nazis, the late lamented "Dandy" used to have a strip called "Addy and Hermy - The Nasty Nazis" which has to be seen to be believed...
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