I am delighted to welcome Herbert Howard Jones, author of The Pyewiz and the Amazing Mobile Phone, to Cafe of Dreams! I want to thank Herbert for taking the time to write such an enjoyable and delightful post for us today!
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Mary Poppins and Me Robots and suits of armour! These were among the obsessions of my childhood. From my earliest days I can remember being fascinated by armour in particular, and I think that my interest in robots grew out of this, and it's easy to see the connection! As a child I was always with pencil in hand, bent over a sketchpad drawing men in metal suits, filling pages and pages up with quite detailed drawings.
At the age of eight, I once built a very crude robot out of wood and set it up against the concrete washing line post in the garden, and remember watching as the sun set, casting its elongated shadow on the lawn. That robot looked powerful to my young eyes, and I think I projected myself into that thing and correspondingly felt empowered by it. Psychologists might think, that because I was a fostered child, that this demonstrated that I felt the need to be protected by someone or something. But my childhood was a very happy one, and I didn't feel vulnerable in the slightest. Quite the reverse. My foster parents indulged me.
My interest in the arts were particularly indulged. My foster parents were always buying me wads of paper, and coloured pens, and water colour paints, painting-by-number kits, canvas boards etc etc. And when these ran out, there was always the back of envelopes or the margins of books. I was once publicly canned at boarding school for drawing in a textbook, (probably more than one). Understandably, drawing cartoons in the flyleaves of text books with risque captions was simply not on, but it came from an innocent old habit.
However, it was useless to argue. I was promptly martyred for my art, and would take my revenge by drawing derogatory characatures of the human agents of my oppression - the teachers! But, looking back, I think my little hands felt naked without a pen, pencil or paintbrush in them. I'm grateful that these tools of creation didn't permanently metamorphasise into something less useful like cigarettes. As a nine year old, I must admit that I did take up smoking briefly, and would regularly smoke in a London pub toilet. But this was just a passing phase and my hands, while still small as a teenager, eventually took up the brushes again.
However, at age three, I discovered Disney! Some of the Disney cartoons of the forties would appear on tv from time to time, or at the cinema, and I would naturally try to reproduce them in my sketchbooks. Disney comic books were also always on hand. I then remember, at the age of six or seven deciding that when I grew up, I wanted to be a cartoonist.
This decision came to me as a kind of revelation, like a bolt from the blue, and I couldn't think of anything more natural than sketching or just mindlessly doodling. The urge to do this was like a nervous twitch which couldn't be controlled, and so I was constantly doing it. When I went to school I was always voted the 'best drawer' in the class, and I can only attribute this to having sketched continually from the age of two.
The final blast of self-realisation occured when Dick van Dyke did some pavement etchings on the big screen in Mary Poppins! It was like the validation of everything I believed. Art was simply where it was at! And when he started to sing, 'Chim chiminey,' well, that was it for me! The gap that existed between art and music had been fused together in a wonderful way. I immediately tried to play the great tunes (by the Sherman brothers) on the rickety old piano we owned, and discovered that I had an ear for music. But I was more successful with simpler Walt Disney tunes like 'Doh-a-Deer' etc.
Walt Disney had me in his spell and I was as spellbound as the next child, only I wanted to be part of the action. I wanted to write my own songs and create my own characters. Although curiously, Mickey Mouse never really did it for me, although I passionately loved the early cartoons from the thirties and forties, and became quite fascinated by the technique of 'chiarascuro' which was often used in these early films. By this I mean, by the depiction of 'deep shadows' which was a hallmark of Disney in those days. It made the cartoons more cosy and mysterious, and perhaps mirrored a side of my developing personality. Subsequently, shadows would invariably turn up in all my drawings.
Whenever I sketched a nose on a face, it would have a deep shadow attached to it. Trees, likewise. My preoccupation with chiaroscuro and shading has never abated! But without Walt Disney and his wonderful creations, my childhood would have been quite barren. They were the creative hook on which I hung my young psyche! The Disney corporation had planted a seed in me which is still there today. And I believe is behind every creative thought and action that I've had ever since!
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About The Pyewiz and the Amazing Mobile Phone:Journey to a frozen planet to find a long lost twin. An amazing crystal phone with incredible powers. A cunning old pirate wizard who must be stopped.
Schoolboy Terry Mctrain thinks the new tenant in his parent's guesthouse is strange. Stranger still is the reason why she is here. Then Terry learns about a twin brother he never knew he had, kidnapped by a pirate wizard years ago. Baffled by all this, Terry realizes there's a mystery to be solved, and a secret to be uncovered. But when he discovers that the fate of the world is also in his hands, he wonders..
Could this turn into the adventure of a lifetime?
Perhaps, but unless Terry and his friend Will travel to the other side of the solar system to solve this puzzle, there's a danger that the world would be destroyed, and his twin brother lost forever.
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A bit about Herbert Howard Jones:Herbert Howard Jones was born in London in 1955, and went to Eccles Hall, a boarding school in Norfolk. He left after a couple of years and attended IIford County High School in Barkingside where he where he met Bram Tovey, now conductor of the Vancouver Symphony orchestra, and pianist Derek Smith who later played with the Johhny Dankworth ensemble. They inspired Jones to take up music, which he still practices today.
Jones attended Lisburn college in Ireland and then worked in a wide variety of occupations. These included in law, as a porter at the BBC, in jewellery manufacture, publishing, and commercial art. As a BBC porter he was required to hump equipment between studios and could be spotted riding shotgun around London in the old green BBC vans of that time. He was eventually sacked for lateness!
He then found a job in a Hatton Garden jewellery firm in London. As an apprentice jeweller he was required to assemble twenty-two 14 carat gold gate bracelets a day. In the two years he spent in the business he had personally made nearly 12000 bracelets, which was quite a feat, but was mind numbing work, and not something he wanted to do with the rest of his life. At this stage he didn’t know what avenue to go down next.
But the clue lay in his early life. As a young boy, he showed an early interest in the arts, particularly writing, musical composition and painting, and has pursued them as interests ever since. At this time he met the daughter of the captain of the Titanic, which sank in 1912, and consequently became obsessed with the myth which surrounded the subject. Jones remembers handling Titantic artifacts in the lady’s cottage country, and thinking that they made beautiful art ornaments! They inspired Jones to start creating collages using old bric-a brac, attaching small objects to canvas and applying paint to them.
In his teens, Jones lived with the family of author Julian Branston, whose mother was a close confidant of British comic Kenneth Williams. They introduced Jones to writer and poet John Pudney, famed as the author of wartime poem ‘For Johnny’. As busy as he was, Pudney would give kindly critiques of Jones’ earlier writings, urging Jones to say ‘more with less’. Jones described his writing efforts at this time as pretentious and undisciplined, and was frankly lucky, that ‘Pudney gave him the time of day,’
Jones found John Pudney fascinating as, among other things, he knew Pablo Picasso personally, having met him as a reporter during the war. To the aspiring and awe struck Jones, this was all glamorous grist for this artistic mill. At this time he became fascinated by celebrity, which was hardly surprising considering that his benefactors frequently had prominent people down to dinner, including the Bishop of Liverpool and others.
When Jones worked for a firm of ‘showbiz’ solicitors in London, he ran errands for screen star John Mills, and composer Tony Hatch, but felt that life as a London commuter just wasn’t for him, and so he ‘dropped’ out and went to live in Deptford. Jones justified this to himself by saying this was his ‘down and out in Paris and London period’.
Jones moved around South London and finally settled in some lodgings in Lewisham which were also being occupied by the now international artist David Mabb, presently Head of Masters at Goldsmith’s college, from whom he acquired wonderful discarded art pieces. Mabb’s charismatic and confident personality had an inspiring effect on Jones who began to look at art in a new light. In Jones’ eyes, David Mabb was ‘one of the solid group of British artists who are exponents of a new kind of socially responsible art, which is dynamic and very much at the cutting edge.’ In Jones’ view, Mabb’s art not only succeeds powerfully as a room decoration, but it invokes a strong visceral response in the viewer. If Jones was going to paint, he wanted his art to be as eloquent as Mabb’s! At the time of writing, Jones is still struggling to achieve this goal. Jones cites US artist Ron English, as his other influence.
Meeting well known people and those active in the arts and entertainment industries had the effect of shaping Jones’ view of the world, and he vowed that one day, he too would make a contribution. It was only in his fifties that
Jones has seriously sought publication. The Pyewiz and The Amazing Mobile Phone is his first book.
At the present time Jones is busily writing his second book and is painting. He hopes to have his first exhibition of art in London in the near future.
Jones’ most thrilling life moment: ‘being six feet away from Frank Sinatra when he came to the London Palladium!’
You can visit his website at
http://www.science-fiction-fantasy.com
