Operation Cedar

This is the story of how I dodged a bullet.

For years after it happened, people used to look at me as if they found me familiar but couldn't quite place me. A few of them came up to me and said "Are you that girl from 'Dreams Come True'?" or some such. After a while, I'd grown up too much to be recognised, and eventually the show changed its title sequence, but for ages that was my tiny bit of fame. And I wasn't just "famous for fifteen minutes" either. It was in it for years. Now of course, they recognise me from some of my other roles. 

 The summer after I left primary school, I saw the 1971 'Willy Wonka' on TV for the first time. It was on a little black and white portable because of my stingy father, so I missed out on the massive, wall-to-wall Technicolor glory of the real thing, and I sometimes wonder what it would've been like seeing it at the cinema at the time of first release. Although this was at the opposite pole from that, it was enough to set me on my way. I expect that if I'd seen it in colour I would've been interested in her turning blue as well but I didn't, so I wasn't. I didn't know what to expect. I'd read 'The Great Glass Elevator' but not its prequel. Strange how I wasn't introduced to it that way since I read so much as a child. You'd think it would've come up at some point sooner or later but it didn't.

I didn't know what to make of it of course. Maybe there was nothing to make of it. I don't know. I was ten at the time, and it fitted into the kind of childhood make-believe games which we've all done, a patchwork of original ideas and things we came across in popular culture. I used to stuff pillows under my clothes in the privacy of my bedroom. Sometimes I'd even prance about the house publicly with them stuffed that way. It embarrasses me now to think of that, but I'm pretty sure my parents didn't mind. What did annoy them, in the end, was that doing that tended to stretch and rip my clothes and I was eventually firmly told off for doing it. I expect they thought it was "just a phase".

Big School started - the stage at which one was expected to "put away childish things". Well I did put them away, but in drawers in my bedroom and behind or on top of the wardrobe - beachballs, balloons, that kind of thing. My resources were scanty, and I'd been rather scared off stuffing by my mum's severe telling off on the matter. One day, though, I was talking about getting wishes granted at school with my friend Stephanie, and she said those fateful words.

"I want to write to 'Jim'll Fix It'. He can make anything happen for you, you know. He could even bring people back to life."

I wasn't so sure about the last bit, but children, even at secondary school, believe strange things sometimes. There's even a website nowadays recording strange beliefs, such as the idea that people speaking foreign languages speak English when you're not around, or that your clothes shrink and you need new ones rather than you growing. Even so, think about that. How many kids had conversations like that, wrote into the show and ended up getting their lives ruined by that strange, creepy man?

And I was about to do that very same thing. I asked my mother's permission and wrote the letter. I expect she felt I needed to get it out of my system and stop ruining all my clothes with my "play-acting" as she put it. There goes that cringe again. Anyway, I wrote Jim a letter, like so many other children before me:

"Dear Jimmy,

"Please could you fix it for me to blow up like a giant blueberry like Violet in 'Charlie And The Chocolate Factory'. Thank you. Love Angela Carpenter"

If you look at videos of the actual show, you can see the fancy, little girl notepaper I used with the cartoon teddy bear at bottom left (it's not the original letter of course but I'll come to that in a bit), and it makes you feel sick to think of all those cute little girls writing letters to that creepy monster, ardently wishing for their dreams to come true and not knowing what could really happen when they went to TV Centre to appear on the show. And I could so very easily have suffered the same fate. It doesn't give me joy to think this way, but I have honestly prayed to God thanking him for saving me from that fate. Then again, what about all the others whose lives were blighted by that man? It's just as well he died young. I hate to think how many more people he would've messed up if he'd lived into his eighties or something. Then again, again, he was never found out, at least by the proper authorities, before he died and there are probably a lot of people who would've cheerfully throttled him or got their revenge in some other creative manner. Maybe he wouldn't have lived much longer anyway, given the number of enemies he was making. But that's all speculation, and in any case I'm getting ahead of myself.