The Third-Class Genie (18 page)

“If we had extra time, we might win.”

Eulalia and Ginger stared at him, then both burst out laughing.

“Skinny, you’re crazy,” they said. Then they waved at him and set off into the gathering darkness.

As they went, Ginger’s voice came back to Alec.

“See you in school tomorrow.”

“OK,” shouted Alec. He turned towards the side entry of his house. He could see his mother talking to Granddad by the light from the door of the caravan.

“You’re late, our Alec. So straight upstairs now.”

Alec didn’t argue. He didn’t feel like saying anything. He walked through the kitchen and climbed the stairs to his room. Once inside, he sat down on his bed and looked around him. His own room.

Perhaps, now that Dad was stirring things up, there might be a chance that Tom and Elaine could find a place nearer home, and maybe he wouldn’t have to move up into the boxroom after all. If he had any luck, that is…

He started to get undressed. The can in his jeans pocket knocked against his leg.

He took it out and was just about to put it away in his cupboard, when he lifted it up to his ear.

He thought, he couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard a faint sound. Not like surf on a distant shore, but snoring on a nearby bed.

Alec grinned happily.

“Ma’asalaama, Abu, wherever you are.”

I once wrote a book in a day – idea after breakfast, a typescript before tea. A short book, of course, but audiences are remarkably impressed when I tell them the story of
this
story.

It isn’t quite true, I have to say, because the imagination always begins work on an idea a long time before it presents itself in usable form. Often, though, this process is hidden, even from the writer, and one cannot say precisely when that first, original, starting point for a given story may have been.

In the case of
The Third-Class Genie
, however, I
know
when the idea
really
first appeared, even if it disappeared again fairly soon afterwards.

I was ten years old, on a solitary walk along the canal, a favourite haunt of mine. With large scenes of industrial ruin, buildings from the old salt mines, derelict warehouses and tumbledown wharves, it was certainly a good place for fantasy. Lying on the ground on one of the bridges was an old tin can. I reacted to this as any kid would. I gave it a tremendous kick and it rolled away down the slope. At that moment someone shouted (in the drumyard at the foot of the hill, I think). Assuming, as ten-year-olds will, that they were shouting at me, I took to my heels down the towpath. After fifty yards, I decided I was safe – they weren’t after me – and I slowed down.

Then the thought came into my head. Suppose the Invisible Man had been having a kip in that can and it was him shouting at me? Cheered by this absurd fantasy I went on my way and soon forgot it. But the idea, unbeknown, was hoarded somewhere in the depths of my mind.

Often, in my teens, I thought of writing stories. I loved reading, so why not make up adventures to my own specifications, with a hero (somewhat like me) to order? Alas, my rather derivative Viking, Western, Crusader sagas rarely got past the first chapters. Later, in the Army, with reading tastes maturing in long periods of boredom, I began to try and write a novel with a capital N. But somehow that never got finished either.

But something else did happen. Serving in Egypt I became aware of Arabic culture and language and a way of seeing history (the Crusades for example) from other people’s point of view.
The Arabian Nights
, which I discovered was a hundred times more vast that the children’s version, fascinated me with its mixture of magic and everyday reality. Why did the genie always emerge from a household object – lamp, ring or bottle?

Later still, married and with our son and daughter learning to read, I started, simultaneously, to make up stories for them and to view critically some of the conventional children’s literature.

And so I began to write children’s books. At first historical novels, since in the late 1960s / early 1970s, they were flavour of the era. But I also wanted to write modern stories about ordinary children. Yet I wanted extraordinary adventures for them, perhaps a mixture of fantasy and reality.

One story seemed tailor-made – Aladdin brought into the twentieth century, a schoolboy having a genie at his command, a schoolboy for whom life often seemed an unequal contest between triumphs and disasters. But, where would the genie be found? The answer came (back) to me one day as I leapt on (or off) a bus, nearly missing my step disastrously: a tin can in the gutter.

And so it was that Alec found Abu Salem the Genie in an old beer can. Abu was “The Third-Class Genie” because a totally omnipotent genie could not possibly offer the jokes, scrapes, or alarming episodes that a sometimes unsuccessful genie might. But Abu could also become a friend and could teach Alec that in the history of battles there are two sides and two points of view.

My mind had one more trick to play on me. The tensions of our own children’s London comprehensive school urged me to bring black kids into the story – Ginger and Eulalia Wallace. While writing the book I suddenly remembered that, of course, genies are black too. And thus, Abu the Genie, whose magic fails in a heroic attempt to transform Alec’s beat-up council estate, materializes into twentieth-century Britain as an illegal immigrant. Now the genie wants “magic” help, and Alec, with his new friends, supplies it.

This story has made its way through twenty-five years and many editions, bringing me countless letters from readers. The response eventually drew me back to the theme with
Genie on the Loose
(Abu’s tearaway son Abdul marooned anarchically in Alec’s home town). Then, at last, I took Alec on a journey through time and space to rescue Abu in
The Last Genie
. He meets genies, evil spirits, wicked wenches, the whole population of
The Arabian Nights
, even Sinbad and AH Baba.

I suppose that for me, these books are themselves a journey through time, back to that long-ago ten-year-old, kicking the can along the canal.

R
OBERT
L
EESON

February 2000

Born in Cheshire in 1928, Robert Leeson worked as a journalist, at home and abroad, for forty years, with an interval of Army service in the Middle East.

He began to write for children in the 1960s, and has published altogether nearly seventy tides, including
The Third-Class Genie, It’s My Life, The Demon Bike Rider
and
Red, White and Blue
, as well as five novels linked to the
Grange Hill
and
Tucker’s Luck
TV series.

In 1985 he received the Eleanor Farjeon Award for services to children and literature.

Married with a son and daughter, he now lives in Hertfordshire.

Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1 Auckland,
New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com