A Blink of the Screen

prince gave everyone medals and they were all very happy.

RINCEMANGLE, THE GNOME OF EVEN MOOR

    ‘C HILDREN’S C IRCLE’ BY U NCLE J IM ,
B UCKS F REE P RESS
, 16 M ARCH–18 M AY 1973
    This is one of the pieces I used to do on Thursday evenings: an earlier and shorter version of what became
Truckers.
The name of the protagonist finds an echo in the later creation of Rincewind the Wizzard, who first appears in
The Colour of Magic.
    Once upon a time there was a gnome who lived in a hollow tree on Even Moor, the strange mysterious land to the north of Blackbury. His name was Rincemangle and as far as he knew he was the only gnome left in the world.
    He didn’t look very gnome-like. He wore a pointed hat, of course, because gnomes do; but apart from that he wore a shabby mouse-skin suit and a rather smelly overcoat made from old moleskins. He lived on nuts and berries and the remains of picnics, and birds’ eggs when he could get them. It wasn’t a very joyful life.
    One day he was sitting in his hollow tree, gnawing a hazel nut. It was pouring with rain, and the tree leaked. Rincemangle thought he was getting nasty twinges in his joints.
    ‘Blow this for a lark,’ he said. ‘I’m wet through and fed up.’
    An owl who lived in the tree next door heard him and flew over.
    ‘You should go out and see the world,’ he said. ‘There’s more places than Even Moor.’ And he told him stories about the streets of Blackbury and places even further away, where the sun always shone and the seas were blue. Actually they weren’t very accurate, because the owl had heard them from a blackbird who heard them from a swallow who went there for his holidays, but they were enough to get Rincemangle feeling very restive.
    In less time than it takes to tell, he had packed his few possessions in a handkerchief.
    ‘I’m off!’ he cried, ‘to places where the sun always shines! How far did you say they were?’
    ‘Er,’ said the owl, who hadn’t the faintest idea, ‘about a couple of miles, I expect. Perhaps a bit more.’
    ‘Cheerio then,’ said Rincemangle. ‘If you could read I’d send you a postcard, if I could write.’
    He scrambled down the tree and set off.
    When Rincemangle the gnome set off down the road to Blackbury he really didn’t know how far it was. It was raining, and he soon got fed up.
    After a while he came to a layby. There was a lorry parked there while the driver ate his lunch and Rincemangle, who had often watched lorries go past his tree, climbed up a tyre and looked for somewhere warm to sleep under the tarpaulin.
    The lorry was full of cardboard boxes. He nibbled one and found it was full of horrible tins. They weren’t even comfortable to sleep on.
    But he did eventually drop off, just as the lorry set off again to Blackbury. When Rincemangle woke up it was very dark in the box, and there was a lot of banging about going on; then that stopped, and after waiting until all the sounds had died away he peered cautiously through the hole.
    The first thing he saw was another gnome.
    ‘Hullo,’ said the gnome. ‘Is there much interesting in there? It looks like another load of baked beans to me. Here, help me get a tin out.’
    Together they gnawed at the box until one tin rolled out. The box was on a high shelf, but the other gnome had got up by climbing it rather like a mountaineer. They lowered the tin down on a piece of thread.
    ‘My name’s Featherhead,’ said the gnome. ‘You’re new here, aren’t you? Just up from the country?’
    ‘I thought I was the only gnome in the world,’ said Rincemangle.
    ‘Oh, there’s a lot of us here. Who wants to live in a hollow tree when you can live in a department store like this?’
    Talking and rolling the tin along in front of them they crept out of the storeroom and set off. The store was closed for the night, of course, but a few lights had been left on. There was a rather nasty moment when they had to hide from the lady who cleaned the floors but, after a long haul up some stairs, Rincemangle arrived at the gnomes’ home.
    The gnomes had built themselves a home under the floorboards between the toy shop and the do-it-yourself department, though they had – er – borrowed quite a lot of railway track from the toy shop and built a sort of underground railway all the way to the restaurant. They even had a telephone rigged up between the colony and the gnomes who lived in the Gents’ Suiting department two floors down.
    All this came