Oi, Squire!
11 Apr 2002
Users of the Archers message
board are familiar with the rantings of "Squire Killick", a purple-faced
blimp in his late 70s who takes every vicissitude of modern life as a
personal insult. Behind the fearsome Squire is the much more even-tempered
Steve Killick, who delivers his fictional creation’s broadsides from his
real-life Sussex smallholding.
Steve
has been listening to The Archers since the early eighties, when he left
Cambridge having taken, in his words, the "rugby player’s degree" (land
management). He became a commercial estate agent in London. The property
business was a heady place in those sharp-suited days, but with the slump
of the early nineties came redundancy and a change of direction.
"I thought I’d rather write
about a recession than star in one", says Steve "so I retrained as a journalist."
He now writes on property for the Sunday Telegraph, Guardian Online and
many financial magazines.
"As a writer, you often find
yourself with a few minutes to spare, so you browse the internet while
you’re waiting for someone to answer the phone or whatever, and I came
upon the Fantasy Archers topic. Because I write a lot of straight stuff,
it was fun to join in some of the off-the-wall conversations there."
Steve’s first fantasy posting
featured Eddie’s errant brother Alf escaping from the desert island where
he had languished. And for his recent 1000th posting, Steve returned to
the theme, bringing revengeful Alf back to Ambridge and blowing the place
up.
"Generally you get a very warm
reception on the board, so it was nice to have a positive reaction to
something I wrote, rather some some sub-editor shrieking at me."
But how did the Squire Killick
persona evolve? "You can blame Mary Sanderson
for that. She has this stupendous character called Lady Smuck, with a
retinue of attendants that form a sort of lunatic fringe to the board.
One morning she replied to one of my messages with "Oi, Squire", and it
just developed from there."
Steve
finds the freelance life fits in well with work on the smallholding, which
he shares with wife Bridget (the "Mem" in Squire Killick parlance), who
works for a pharmaceutical company: "We’ve just had one of the smallest
lambs I’ve ever seen born, so it’s good to be able to check on it every
couple of hours, to make sure it’s still alive". As well as the ewes and
lambs, Steve looks after the ducks, hens and geese, while Bridget tends
to the horses and ponies.
Like all sheepkeepers, Steve
and Bridget went through an awful time during last year's foot and mouth
outbreak. "It’s hard to give a picture of the misery and the mud. We had
45 sheep then and we’ve got 14 now. We were selling them for £1.50 each."
No surprise then, that Steve
listens to The Archers mainly for the non-farming stories: "It’s great
escapism when Joe is at his best and Brian is at his worst."
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