So how did all this start – the stories, QuizzicalWorks, the behatted upside-down man?
My paternal grandmother was Danish, and during the 1920s and early 30s my father and his siblings spent idyllic summers halfway up the east Sjælland coast in the family home in Humlebæk, a small town not far from Helsingør (Elsinore in Shakespeare’s Hamlet). One day when my father was young, he met a girl up a cherry tree – as you do – and they became great friends. When the war intervened my father and the girl lost contact. In the 1970s, quite by chance, they met again. By this time, she had been married for many years to a highly-respected professor and the Danish king’s architect, and they lived in a wonderful house in Nyhavn in Copenhagen in which a century earlier Hans Christian Andersen had had lodgings.
Later, when working regularly in Denmark for various reasons, I stayed on numerous happy occasions in the Nyhavn house. During my first time there in 1980 I was preparing to join a theatre company in the US (I ended up touring with them all over the country on and off for nearly three years). One of my roles with the company was to go occasionally into schools in far-flung communities and teach. For the primary classes I based my main lesson on fairytales and Andersen, and to gen up on that I studied his stories in both English and Danish. I was, I confess, an appalling teacher (hats off to teachers; not an easy job!), and I doubt if those young Americans learned much from the short time I spent with them. Quite apart from the content – some of which centred on The Ugly Duckling, including a fair rendition of the Danny Kaye song – the kids found me and my English accent strange, particularly in some southeastern and midwestern states (oddly, in Oklahoma they thought I was Australian, while in the Dakotas they thought I was from Texas). On the other hand, I certainly learned a lot!
But to return to the stories: somehow, because of my regular sojourns in the Copenhagen house and through so much contact with Andersen’s work some of the great man’s quirky way of perceiving the world rubbed off on me – or so I like to believe. Hence, to a certain extent, the style and content of the stories in the current and future collections.
As for QuizzicalWorks: some years ago, during my time with the BBC World Service, I considered setting up some sort of non-fiction publishing business with the name QwizzicalJerks, but as this might be misconstrued (really?) I shelved it until much later when I decided to go ahead with the stories – and then the revised name seemed to fit the bill perfectly. What’s more, it was available.
As for the behatted upside-down man logo: that’s from my father. A neurologist, he used to think a lot (one of the prerequisites of the job), and often as he thought he would doodle on a large sheet of blotting paper on his desk. Some of the blotters were crammed with scribbled notes and figures (medical and otherwise), but also with cats, ships, trains and odd-looking people in various guises and in various coloured inks – works of art in themselves. Sadly, I managed to rescue only a few blotters. So glad I got the upside-down ‘hatman’, however, as he seems entirely appropriate for present and future QuizzicalWorks projects.