TALKING TURKEYS
In the busy year that was 1993 I was approached by the children’s publisher Puffin Books. They asked if I was interested in writing a book of poems for children. I wasn’t. I was performing in schools, and some of my poems could have been called children’s poems, but I didn’t want to separate them into categories based on age.
Although I resisted at first, the scout from Puffin kept on at me. I started thinking about it. Lots of children were telling me they really liked seeing their own books, on their own bookshelves, and that having a few poems of their own in books for adults wasn’t good enough. Secondly, there was an absence of black writers on those bookshelves, and I was in a position to change this. So I stopped resisting and started working on my first children’s book.
I already had a handful of poems, but there was one in particular that would go on to have a life of its own. The previous year I’d been working on a TV programme with Gaby Roslin and Craig Charles. We were filming on a city farm, where I had to write and perform three poems. I had written two but was struggling with the third, and inspiration wasn’t coming. The night before the last day of filming I called Craig and asked if he would write it, but he insisted that I do it. He said I was thinking about it too much, and I should just relax and write whatever came into my mind.
When we’d finished the call, I then imagined myself on the farm surrounded by turkeys, and I asked myself what I would want to say to the world. Then it flowed.
Be nice to yu turkeys dis Christmas,
’cos turkeys just wanna hav fun.
Turkeys are cool, turkeys are wicked,
an every turkey has a mum.
And so ‘Talking Turkeys’ was born. And it became the title of the book, which was published in 1994. I’ve no idea how many books were printed in the first run, but I was told they had to reprint very quickly because it had sold so well.
It has since become trendy for comedians and celebrities to write children’s books, but when I wrote Talking Turkeys it wasn’t seen as cool at all. In some circles I was even mocked for it. Twenty-five years ago, children’s books that included animal characters tended to be about clever, fluffy creatures and their adventures, whereas the animals in my book mainly feared being eaten. Children in my book were being bullied, and the earth was being abused and polluted, just like the real world.
For many years I never considered performing ‘Talking Turkeys’ live, but one night I decided to end my gig with it. I thought it would be a nice change from all the heavy stuff I was doing, and I was absolutely astonished by the reaction of the audience. All I did was open with the first line, ‘Be nice to yu turkeys dis Christmas’, and the crowd went wild. I was shocked. And then I noticed, as I went through the lines, other people were going through them with me. When I said the last line, the roar from the audience reminded me of a football crowd. I hadn’t realised what that poem meant to people, or how many people were coming to my performances waiting for me to perform it and going home disappointed.
I’ve turned down five requests for the poem to be used in advertising, most notably and bizarrely by Bernard Matthews meat products, which was probably the most surprising and made me the most angry. Some of my hardcore followers really don’t like the fact that it’s the poem the establishment goes to when they speak of me, rather than my more revolutionary poems, but there’s nothing I can do about that.
It has captured the imagination of so many children and young people, and I’ve even known situations where teachers have got competitive about whose class or school has a child that can perform the best recitation of the poem.
What has given me most joy over the years is when new generations of children discover the poem, and the number of children who have performed it, many of them posting their performances online. This happens all year round, all over the world, but there’s always a noticeable spike around Christmas.
The poem lives through them for sure.