John Wyndham’s Chocky

Kamikaze!

**Transcript: Chocky **

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we’re talking about Chocky by John Wyndham. Enjoy!

(Intro music plays)

Ren Good evening, Adam!

Adam Good evening and merry Christmas, Ren!

Ren Yeah, we’re recording on the 22nd of December.

Adam That checks out!

Ren So things are about to get festive.

Adam How are you doing? You said you were a little bit tired.

Ren I am a bit tired. I feel like I have lots of Christmas jobs left to do, and I don’t think I actually do. I think I just feel intangibly burdened.

Adam Like a little Gregor Samsa!

Ren Exactly.

Adam So, just to check up on you… you do rollerblading these days, you’ve got back into rollerblading, so do you do rollerblading round a track and then knocking people other?

Ren No…

Adam I thought maybe you were doing roller derby.

Ren Not the roller derby, you have to do that on rollerskates anyway.

Adam Ah, okay, because I can imagine you doing the ducking, diving and weaving around and being quite sneaky with it, but at the same time it sounds quite terrifying.

Ren Well, I go to the roller disco, which we have here in Glasgow.

Adam Well that sounds very hip!

Ren It’s great fun, I go to the roller disco and go round and round in circles and just have a lovely time.

Adam Oh my gosh, do you get the Pet Shop Boys playing and stuff?

Ren Well yeah, I’m always very into the 80s bangers, as you know.

Adam Amazing! I never did much rollerskating, I never got into rollerblading as a kid but I did go rollerskating at the tenpin bowling place and I do have vivid memories of ‘Go West’ by Pet Shop Boys playing while desperately trying to push myself towards the side, holding on.

Ren It’s a good time, I went for a birthday and got a shout out, “Ren it’s their 37th birthday” and I’m like “Hell yeah!”

Adam Oh my gosh, we’re old! How did we get old? I took my eye off the ball to be honest!

Ren Are you 39?

Adam Not quite, I’m still 38. I blame lockdown, I spent too much time during lockdown playing Sega Mega Collection and completing Sonic Spinball for the first time.

Ren Sonic Spinball, yes!

Adam With the rewind function! Which was very gracious, I think. I was suddenly able to complete Sonic Spinball, which obviously was the highlight of my life. I remember it taking an evening but maybe it didn’t, maybe it took the whole lockdown, maybe I spent the whole year and a half doing it.

Ren Aw, it’s such a good game.

Adam It’s really funny because it wasn’t made by the Sonic team it was made by a different team, so I don’t know if you remember the sprites are chunkier, it’s a chunky Sonic. But yeah, it is a very satisfying game, and it was really satisfying to complete it.

Ren Yeah, I bet! That’s worth ageing prematurely.

Adam Yeah, I agree! Thank you, thank you! So today we’re returning to an author we’ve covered before, way back near the start of the podcast.

Ren Yep, 2018.

Adam 2018 before time started to get weird. We did The Crysalids, which was an earlier Wyndham and we’re now looking at Chocky which was the last book Wyndham published before he died, though it does continue the theme or motif of telepathy that we had in The Crysalids, in The Crysalids it was these mutated teenagers, or teenagers that had this mutation that meant they could communicate telepathically, and that meant they became the outcasts in their society, whereas in Chocky it’s an otherwise normal 8 year old boy —

Ren — 11 year old —

Adam — Oh, 11 year old boy Matthew, who is communicated telepathically with by an alien, an alien presence or being called Chocky. Does Matthew name her Chocky, do we find out? Or is that how she names herself?

Ren I think that is Chocky’s own choice.

Adam Because it’s quite a diminutive name, it sounds like a pet name. Chocky!

Ren Yeah, this novel’s from 1968, there’s also a TV series from 1984 —

Adam — Yeah, quite a while later.

Ren Which we both watched the first series of which follows the events of the book quite faithfully, and then there are subsequent seasons and I don’t know what they do!

Adam Yeah, I looked at the Wikipedia articles and it sounds like they go down the government intrigue [route], I might watch them play itself [themselves] out. This was expanded from a shorter story originally, I know some other sci-fi authors of his generation could be a bit down on Wyndham as an author. I suppose he's a soft sci-fi, civilisation and how humans work and don’t work together, but he’s not really interested in the technical details of how, say, telepathy works. How humans react to certain events, and seeing those play through rather than scientific aspects. It’s tricky whether the book is children’s horror, people do read Wyndham as children, my mum read him. He’s quite similar to Ray Bradbury, he started writing for sci-fi magazines, short stories, golden age…

Ren When you could make a living out of short stories

Adam When you could make a living out of short stories, same for Kurt Vonnegut. I must have come across Chocky as a TV show in lists of ‘Which TV shows scared you as a child?’

Ren I can see that, because with the book, most of the stories [in] children’s horror, the parents are usually either dead or absent or useless.

Adam It’s narrated by Matthew’s father.

Ren And the parents learn gradually about Chocky through Matthew and their concerns are those of parents. So we do get the trope of the child being disbelieved by adults, but from the other perspective.

Adam Margaret Atwood, who wrote an introduction to the re-issue of the book, said that she had just about lost interest by the time Chocky was released, describes it as lightly humorous. I think Chocky’s really interesting in terms of genre, because Wyndham takes a long time to play his cards over whether Chocky is dangerous or not, and on the surface the narrative looks — what Matthew's mother is worried about — early onset schizophrenia, coming from inside his head on some level. So there’s uncertainty about that, and what Chocky is up to and whether Chocky is a friendly presence or a more sinister presence. It’s not scary but it’s quite an uneasy read; also how Matthew reacts to Chocky. Matthew likes having Chocky around and Chocky asks a lot of questions about human culture but is also amused by aspects of human culture, rude and mocking… Matthew is deeply upset by this. There’s a scene where Matthew's dad has a nice new car and Chocky is really unimpressed by the car, and poor Matthew is screaming “No, no!” with some serious intensity in the TV version.

(Clip: No! No! No! Go away!)

Ren Good child actor Andrew, really sells it.

Adam Went on to be a teacher and died sadly, recently, and is great. Sells what is a quite difficult role because there’s quite a lot of him basically talking to himself.

Ren Prompts Matthew’s dad to say “I know this fella from Cambridge, he’s a psychiatrist, maybe he can have a little chat with Matthew”. The character is Roy Landis, who I think comes across more sinister in the TV series.

Adam He’s quite amicable in the book.

Ren He’s quite intense.

Adam It’s quite clear to Landis that this is not in Matthew’s head because he’s able to talk about these aspects of future technology that are clearly coming from an outside source, being communicated with, he’s a cultural relativist, ancestors might have called this possession.

Ren I think that is one of the potential horror aspects, this idea of possession, and possession by what?

Adam Weird voice, whispering little reverberant voice, do find it a bit creepy.

(Clip: Alright, concentrate and I will show you.)

Ren Accompanied by a blue light

Adam That’s kind of superimposed – shall we do ‘Texture of the Week’ early? I’ve got some Waitrose cooks ingredients as taken from my mum: “Be bold with the stem ginger”.

Ren Well you have to, you simply have to.

Adam I am going to be bold with it, I’m going to shake it!

Ren Okay.

Adam We should be whispery I guess, like Chocky.

Ren

Adam So yes I thought of the title sequence they have this vapourwave horror, library music by Astral Sounds.

Ren Amazing.

Adam Library music that’s meant to evoke being underwater (clip of music plays underneath the description) and then this vapourwave prism.

Ren Mmhmm mhm.

Adam And then Matthew’s head.

Ren There’s a negative of his head, which becomes green.

Adam So I thought of that, I then later thought of Matthew’s mother’s jumper which was astonishing.

(Ren cackles.)

Adam It’s got this beautiful flower pattern on it, it’s really nice then along the top in large letters it says ‘Kamikaze!’

Ren Yeah, it does! thank you for mentioning that.

Adam So my actual texture is white fruit.

Ren Oh, white fruit?

Adam I’m glad this is a different one. Matthew ends up in what looks like a hospital, it’s not a hospital, researching that Matthew might have telepathic powers, he is kidnapped briefly and put in this facility for a week and given a truth serum and in this very white facility he is fed or given white fruit, there’s a bowl of fruit and it’s all been painted white, like white grapes, odd little detail.

Ren I think I’m going to go with Twinklehooves. Matthew has a little sister called Polly, and one of the running jokes in the book is Polly’s unhelpful interjections about her favourite fictional character, a horse called Twinklehooves. So when Matthew is kidnapped she says: “When Twinklehooves was kidnapped they tried to turn him into a pit pony!” and when Matthew doesn’t finish his dinner she says “Twinklehooves went off his food when his friend Stareyes died. It was very sad”. And I love the continuing adventures of Twinklehooves.

Adam Wyndham probably enjoyed coming up with that. She’s quite precocious – she’s quite a convincingly irritating little sister.

Ren I wondered if you wanted to read the description of Piff.

Adam “Piff was a small, or supposedly small, invisible friend that Polly had acquired when she was about five. And while she lasted she was a great nuisance. One would start to sit down upon a conveniently empty chair only to be arrested in an unstable and inelegant pose by a cry of anguish from Polly; one had, it seemed, been about to sit on Piff. Any unexpected movement, too, was liable to bowl over the intangible Piff who would then be embraced and comforted by a lot of sympathetic muttering about careless and brutal daddies. Frequently, and more likely than not when a knockout seemed imminent, or the television play had reached the brink of its denouement, there would come an urgent call from Polly’s bedroom above; the cause had to be investigated although the odds were about four to one that it would concern Piff’s dire need of a drink of water. We would sit down at a table for four in a cafe, and there would be agonized appeals to a mystified waitress for an extra chair for Piff. I could be in the act of releasing my clutch when a startling yell would inform me that Piff was not yet with us, and the car door had to be opened to let her aboard. Once I testily refused to wait for her. It was not worth it; my heartlessness had clouded our whole day.”

Ren This is when Chocky first turns up, this is what they’re comparing Chocky to.

Adam Chocky is less irritating than Piff, Chocky is a scout, trying to work out if the Earth is practical for their race – I say their, but, Chocky struggles with the idea of a mother and a father and they just have one parent on their planet.

Ren This is one of the strange questions that Matthew asks his mother.

Adam Matthew and his father can’t cope with the indeterminacy of calling Chocky ‘they’.

Ren Chocky sounds a bit like a bossy older sister, doesn’t have a gender on the prog rock album cover planet.

Adam It is a very prog rock album cover planet.

Ren Matthew lets Chocky take hold of him, or use his hands to draw, so she can – she’s annoyed at his lack of drawing skills, these slightly odd paintings.

Adam I think handing over to Chocky is a bit like handing over to AI, really it’s Chocky’s work, he’s quite an honest kid and doesn’t like the idea.

Ren Quite like a young Adam, I imagine.

Adam I respected that! He’s a nice kid, it’s an 80s TV show but it’s early 80s. Our sense of a decade often comes from the mid or late part of the decade, this still feels quite 70s. The quietness is particularly striking, you do get them playing a video game, an Atari.

Ren They play an Atari, and Matthew solves a Rubix Cube.

Adam I remember Stewart Lee, in an early Screenwipe comparing, slightly unfairly, Children of the Stones to Skins. And I don’t think that’s comparing like with like anyway, but he was talking about how polite the children are in Children of the Stones; Matthew was a very polite child.

John Wyndham’s background is interesting – his full name is, he came from an upper-middle class background, and his father tried to sue his mother’s family for emotional control and failed, an early harassment case was bought against him and ruined his father’s reputation and then Wyndham was downwardly mobile and he and his mum and sibling had to move to a smaller home. I don’t think there’s much about class in it, except for the fact that they’re comfortably middle-class.

Ren I think that’s meant to be part of the ‘the very normal, look at this extremely normal family’.

Adam What did you think of the TV series as an adaptation of the book?

Ren It was very faithful to the book, there were some moments where things felt creepier than in the book.

Adam I thought it was creepier than the book.

Ren The kidnapping sequence, I think, seeing Matthew in this white room where he thinks he’s been in a car accident, and they’re injecting him with things, and it is a very benign kidnapping as they go, but it is very creepy.

Adam It’s like something from The Prisoner, do you see things from Matthew’s perspective in that scene?

Interestingly, Steven Spielberg has long held the adaptation rights to this, and is a big fan, and I think that makes sense in light of this being an influence on ET and Close Encounters, the hospital scenes in ET are quite unsettling and have this vibe of threat, I suppose. And ET’s obviously a pretty friendly alien but you're not sure at first what’s going on with him, and the same with Close Encounters. You do see the aliens eventually in Close Encounters but for a lot of the film you don’t see the aliens, they’re quite mysterious, and clearly it’s concerned like how do you communicate with an alien.

Because Chocky communicates with Matthew through telepathy but only has access to Matthew’s vocabulary, so is restricted to…

Ren Yes because it turns out at the end, Chocky talks to the father through Matthew and Chocky explains why they came to Earth and about being a scout and that humans would need to find a new source of power.

Adam Oh Chocky, it’s true! It’s true!

Ren And she’s been trying to tell Matthew about this endlessly renewable source of power, but he doesn’t understand it, and he goes to see another psychologist who hypnotises him and fobs off the father saying “it’s just a fantasy” but it’s implied he’s behind the kidnapping.

Adam I’d already, something that felt a bit uncanny, I don’t know if you saw the story the other day about a Portuguese scientist who was murdered, it’s speculated that this was an assassination basically, so that became a little bit unsettling, revisiting the end of Chocky and the TV show and to become the scientist who unlocks this potential energy source. There would obviously be vested interests, whether fossil fuel interests or others ones who would want to stop this or take it themselves, I think that is another sinister element of the book, you have this relationship or friendship that is developing between, but once adults start finding out about it it becomes more fraught, how the adult humans try to get involved

In terms of explicit horror, I think the hospital seems the most unsettling, but actually before the kidnapping, but before that there’s this accident that happens when Matthew and his family are on holiday and him and his sister are out on a jetty and a boat comes loose of its moorings and they're both catapulted into the water, this comes right at the end of episode 4, family friends’ daughter screaming really loudly and this close up on her face as she screams, and that’s the cliffhanger.

Ren For whatever reason the version I was watching on YouTube the sound cut out at the end of episode 4, close-ups of this girl.

Adam A very Stranger Things cliffhanger, currently watching Season 5, the kids – well they’re not kids anymore – the characters are put into peril.

Ren If they’ve lasted this long.

Adam Do a Blake’s 7 and kill off all of them at the end. Here’s hoping!

Ren You’ll be one of the only people to know, who’s continuing to watch Stranger Things.

Adam Oh well, you know, the first season was good.

Ren Yeah, I liked the first season. So I have a bit of a digression we can take if we want to.

Adam I think we have time for a small digression.

Ren I have been reading at the same time, Donald Winnicot’s The Piggle?

Adam So is the psychologist Winnicot [the same as the author]?

Ren Yes, and this book is a blow by blow account of a girl called Gabrielle, she was having nightmares about something called the ‘Babacar’ that was chasing her, and it was about what he did in these sessions. It’s really interesting. John Wyndham and Donald Winnicot are very close contemporaries in age, and they’re a very particular generation in Englishman, to us they would be great-grandparents. And I found something similar in tone, and a similar masculinity that I find quite appealing in Wyndham’s protagonists. I quite like Wyndham’s men, like the father in Chocky and the protagonist in The Kraken Wakes.

Adam They’re protectors, and it is paternalistic, but there’s a kind of gentle, non-patronising paternalism in the way that Matthew’s father talks to him.

Ren And if you compare, I was talking to Mattie about this, the father in The Crysalids, who is this very intolerant fundamentalist, and the father in Chocky is open-minded, and is like: “Well, Matthew old chap, why don’t you tell me about this Chocky?”

Adam Yeah, yeah. Presumably that was Winnicot’s approach?

Ren Well, it has this kind of old-fashioned masculinity, but he is also getting on the floor and playing with the child, and I quite like that. That was my digression.

Adam The Piggle? It does seem like the name of a children’s horror book.

Ren The psychologists or psychiatrists don’t come across well in Chocky, so they are un-Winnicot like.

Adam That’s true actually. Controlling his body to swim, I’m not sure if it’s that Chocky puppeteers Matthew in these instants, or Chocky unlocks this. When Matthew’s drawing he says that Chocky teaches him to see properly, it’s like the potentiality is already inside Matthew’s body.

Ren He gets a medal from the Royal Swimming Society, but he doesn’t want it because…

Adam No! It wasn’t me! It was Chocky!

Ren The book and the TV series end on this very sweet note.

Adam It is very sweet.

Ren The dad has had the medal re-inscribed so it says “awarded to Chocky for a valorous deed’. Any other bits from the TV series to mention? We’ve talked about the kamikaze jumper.

Adam It was directed by Doctor Who and Z Cars writer Anthony Read, so if there’s a slight Doctor Who feel to proceedings, that’s why.

Ren I think there is a slight Doctor Who feeling to proceedings

Adam We should probably do some Doctor Who at some point, it’s one of those things like Goosebumps where I feel like there’s so many podcasts talking about Doctor Who, and probably every Doctor Who episode that it’s like ‘eh, what’s the point?’

Ren Shall I read the description of the painting of Chocky’s home world?

Adam Ooh yeah, I really like that! The paintings of humans sound a bit like Modigliani with these elongated faces.

Ren “It was a view across a plain. As a background, a view of rounded, ancient-looking hills, topped here and there by squat dome towers was set against a cloudless blue sky. In the middleground, to the right of centre, stood something like a very large cairn. It had the shape, though not the regularity, of a heightened pyramid, nor where the stones, if stones they were, fitted together. Rather they seemed, as far as one could tell from the drawing, to be boulders piled up. It could scarecely have been called a building yet it quite certainly was not a natural formation. In the foreground were rows of things precisely spaced and arranged in curving lines. I say things because it was impossible to make out what they were. They could have been bulbous succulent plants, or haycocks or perhaps even huts, there was no telling. And to make their shape more difficult to determine, each appeared to throw two shadows.

From the left of the picture, a wide cleared strip ran straight as a ruler’s edge to the foot of the cairn, where it changed direction towards a bank of haze at the foot of the mountains. It was a depressing vista, all except the blue of the sky in unrelieved browns, reds, greys, filled with a sense of aridity and a feeling of intolerable heat.”

Adam It does sound pretty Prog Rock.

Ren Yeah.

Adam Have you ever listened to Cat Stevens very strange Prog Rock concept album?

Ren I haven’t, should I?

Adam Well yeah, once. It's sort of about Pythagorean theory.

Ren Okay great, brilliant.

Adam It’s very hippyish. It’s got a little book inside the record sleeve. It’s called Numbers and it’s Cat Stevens one and only concept album. It’s based on a fictional planet in a far off galaxy called Polygor.

Ren Mmhmm.

Adam This is Wikepdia: “The concept of the album is a fantastic spiritual musical which is set on the planet Polygor. In the story there is a castle with a number machine. This machine exists to fulfill the sole purpose of the planet – to disperse numbers to the rest of the universe: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (but notably not 0).

The nine inhabitants of Polygor, the Polygons, are Monad, Dupey, Trezlar, Cubis, Qizlo, Hexidor, Septo, Octav, and Novim. As the first lines of the book say, they “followed a life of routine that had existed for as long as any could remember. It was, therefore, all the more shocking when on an ordinary day things first started to go wrong. The change takes the form of Jzero, who comes from nowhere as a slave and eventually confuses everybody with his simple truth.”

Ren Ahhh, okay!

Adam It’s very ‘zen’ in probably heavy quotation marks, but I quite like it.

Ren Okay, I’m going to wrap it up.

Adam That’s fair, we don't need to talk about Prog Rock too much. I’ve got a couple of ideas for the next podcast, have you heard of Robert Cormier?

Ren Oh yeah.

Adam Oh you have, okay! There’s one called Fade, a kind of Invisible Man story about a child who starts doing wrong when he gets the chance to become invisible, which sounds quite unsettling. And his last Young Adult novella is called The Rag and Bone Shop, and it’s genuinely very dark.

But the reason I thought of you, and I might be wrong, I might have been thinking of someone else but in my mind I was like: ‘this must have been Ren’. So, Ren, did you used to get emotional about the fact that the cheese stands alone, in ‘The Farmer in the Dell’.

Ren (laughing) No…

Adam I remember someone pointing out that the last line in ‘The Farmer in the Dell’ is “The cheese stands alone, The cheese stands alone, Ee-i, adio, The cheese stands alone.”

I can definitely imagine you going: (distraught) “Adam, the cheese stands alone! The cheese stands alone!” To be honest, I can’t imagine anyone else I know saying that.

Ren It does sound like me!

Adam Let’s be honest, it does sound like you!

Ren I also have a couple of suggestions.

Adam Oh, I’ll just say quickly, my other suggestion was because Ava was interested, I messaged Ava because I was in a primary school with nothing to do during registration, because in this school they give me nothing to do. And it was Robin Jarvis, and the introduction to The Woven Path, and it was horrible! Oh Robin Jarvis, I forget about how horrible you are! It was nasty. So I did say, hey, Ava, do you want to do the museum ones, and Ava was keen so we should definitely do that at some point.

Ren That sounds good.

Adam What were your suggestions?

Ren Well, I met someone in London called Kat, who I mentioned this podcast and she said: “Ah! You should do Clive Barker of Hellraiser fame’s children’s book The Thief of Always!”

Adam Ooh, I didn’t know he did a children’s book, that is quite tempting. That would give me a chance to play some of his FMV games as well.

Ren Yes, so I think we should do Clive Barker’s children’s book at some point. And after we talked about Melvin Burgess last episode I bought Junk to reread, and another book of his called Sara’s Face, which I think is a horror one. It might be a bit grisly.

Adam I bet. Junk made quite the impression on me. I think these last two have been my choices, so I’m definitely up for Clive Barker, because I didn’t know he’d done a children’s book.

Ren Do you have a sign-off for us Adam?

Adam If you tell anyone about this episode, make sure you say ‘Chocky’ and not ‘Chuhcky!’ because then people will think you’re saying ‘Chucky’ and Chucky from Child’s Play is not children’s horror and I wouldn’t be putting it on the podcast.

Ren Alright. Catch you next time spooky kids!

Adam Bye!