Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [139]
Cousin Jobiska: Edward Lear's Pobble Who Had No Toes had an Aunt Jobisca who gave him to drink lavender water tinged with pink. When a close relative of mine was suffering from advanced Alzheimer's and had to go into Hellingly Hospital, a giant rambling NHS institution in rural East Sussex, there was a tiny and very sweet old lady on his ward, who constantly said "Take me home, dear. I want to go home." Bless her, I don't think she really remembered where home was. It seemed to change on a weekly basis, rather like Jobiska's age. Hellingly, with its gothic architecture and warren of corridors, was yet another inspiration for Lungbarrow. It was closed in the cutbacks, a lot of patients went back to the community (maybe some got into government) and the place is now something like luxury flats. The House of Lungbarrow would not have stood for that.
The God of Pain is one of the old Gal ifreyan Gods, aka the Menti Celesti, who could also be Eternals (Enlightenment.) They turn up throughout the New Adventures, most notably Time (as the Doctor was her champion) and Death. I had to coordinate the writing of Lungbarrow with Kate Orman, whose Room With No Doors was the previous book in the series. I rang Kate in Sydney and she was in the middle of her birthday dinner.
After we'd both stopped going "Oh, my God!" at each other, she pointed me towards a painting, The Death of Arthur by J.G. Archer, which shows the dying King Arthur laid on a seashore, tended by three queens before he's ferried off to Avalon. Kate saw the three women as the embodiment of the Gallifreyan Gods - Red/black for Death, white for Pain and an unfixed shifting colour for Time. Bizarrely I knew the picture and had already used it in the novelisation of Battlefield. Things, like Gallifreyan clocks, run in complex interlocking circles.
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And talking of Gallifreyan clocks... The arrival of the TARDIS sends out ripples, toppling Innocet's house of cards and setting frozen time in the House moving again. And poor old Arkhew is trapped in the orrery-like clock as all the planets and orbits, representing space and legend, start to activate around him. The Doctor, of course, insists he doesn't believe in omens.
Chapter 5
Lungbarrow's attic is like a fairy tale forest. The giant furniture recalls when we are little and can only just see over the top of the table at what Mum is doing for tea. I once saw an opera production in which a character regressed to childhood, dreaming she was ascending to Heaven. In answer to this, a white staircase at the side of the stage was suddenly replaced by a giant version of the same staircase. The character became a child again, climbing this mountainous slope one big step at a time. It was an unforgettable and radiant image. Lungbarrow's not so radiant, but you get the idea...
In the original version, it was Ace who went through the looking glass into the House's past. As a visual reference, I copied the Tenniel illustration of Alice climbing over the mantle into the glass and substituted our Perivale heroine with her Ace jacket on.
When I worked at Woodlands at BBC White City, our open-plan office was right next to the reference library. One lunchtime I found an old copy of Spotlight from the 1930s with a portrait of a young and dapper comedy actor called Billy Hartnel . I'd suggested we use it as a basis for a framed picture which the Doctor would uncover and hurriedly hide again in fright.
The garden itself is another Gal ifreyan timepiece with the statue of Rassilon as its centre.
The Drudges are the ultimate evolved form of Lungbarrow's furniture. Living wooden servants who tend to the day-to-day needs of the House. We had debates in the tv production office as to whether they should be male or female. Ben suggested (it's always Ben) that they should be one of each, but you'd never be quite sure which was which. At this point, Ace had dubbed them Grim and Grimmer. I'd always seen them as fearsome wooden Victorian governesses, but Daryl Joyce's illustrations show them as quite beautiful