Rob Wilkins - Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

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First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Doubleday

Copyright Rob Wilkins, 2022

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design by Richard Ogle/TW
Front cover photograph by Tom Pilston/Independent/Alamy

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ISBN: 978-1-473-56894-5

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Five months before he died, Terry Pratchett wrote five letters, sealed them in envelopes and locked them in the safe in his office to be opened after his death. This was the one he addressed to me.

Wiltshire

4th October 2014

Dear Rob,

So. I have gone. There were days when I felt I had already gone and so all I wish for now is a cool, quiet room and some peace to gather my addled thoughts. I think I was good, although I could have been better, but Terry Pratchett is dead and there are no more words.

Look after Lyn, please. Have those fine pieces of jewellery cast to my design and give them with my love. Choose a gift every Christmas and birthday. Send flowers. Have a big dinner each year, more if necessary or if a celebration is required, and raise a brandy to my memory and to happy days.

Look after the business and it will look after you. For all you have done, for all of the little things and all of the much bigger things and for the burying of the bodies I thank you.

Learn to fly. Do it now.

And mind how you go.

Strive!

Terry

Just to be clear from the outset: there were no actual bodies in need of burying during my years of working with Terry Pratchett. Terry could get quite exasperated with people sometimes, and certainly did not (as people often found themselves saying about him) suffer fools gladly. But he never got that exasperated. So, for fans of exhumation and cold-case detective mysteries the book you are holding is not that kind of book.

However, there is no question that a lot went on during Terrys life that I was in a unique position to witness and be involved with all of the little things and all of the much bigger things, to quote Terrys letter and the plan is that this will be very much that kind of book.

And just to be clear about something else, the pages that follow attempt to cover the whole of Terrys life-story, not just the part of Terrys life-story that I was around for. And they are certainly not an attempt to tell my life-story. But I probably do need to spend a little time here at the beginning to explain who I am, how I came to be in the room with Terry in the first place and how I come to be writing this biography of him.

So, by way of background: my name is Rob Wilkins and I was meant to be a lady from the village. At least, to the extent that he had a particular type of person in mind, those seemed to be the lines along which Terry was thinking when he decided it was time he got a personal assistant.

She would be someone who might respond to a card in the window of the village shop: someone, most likely retired, who was in a position to come in for a few days a week to help with the admin, do some filing, maybe turn her hand to a VAT return perhaps, with a bit of luck, ensure there was milk in the office fridge for cups of tea so that Terry, who kept forgetting that detail, didnt have to get up from his desk and walk all the way back down to the house for it.

She would be someone (and this was important) who wasnt a big reader of Terry Pratchetts books, who might then have questions or, worse than that, suggestions. Or, worse than that, opinions. Because, without wishing to sound ungrateful, that could be distracting, which would defeat the point.

The fact that Terry was thinking about personal assistants at all well, this, I think we can allege, was substantially Jilly Coopers fault. These two stellar British authors, Jilly and Terry, had collided amid the canaps at a publishing event in London, as stellar authors sometimes will. And during the conversation Terrys ears had pricked up at Jillys casual references to my PA a woman called, it seemed, Amanda, whom Jilly warmly described as heavenly and wonderfully kind and whom she unhesitatingly declared to be the best in the business.

Now, Terry, who was largely indifferent to the worlds trappings, nevertheless had, like most writers, a thin but steely competitive streak that ran through him like a piano string, and which could occasionally be plucked. This appears to have been one of those occasions. If the author of such bestselling works as Riders, Rivals and Score! was officially a novelist in need of personal assistance, then didnt it follow that Terry, who at this point had sold around 50 million books in 29 languages, was in need of personal assistance too?

Whatever, the hymning of Amanda reverberated with Terry, and continued to reverberate with him as, entirely unassisted personally, he drove himself back home to Wiltshire that night.

This was in the year 2000. Terry was 52. He was living in what he called a Domesday Manorette outside Salisbury. He had spent a decade as Britains best-selling author, a title he had only recently conceded, with some reluctance, to a writer called J. K. Rowling. The Discworld series was now 25 novels long, on its way to the eventual total of 41, and he had written a string of books outside it, too, including an enormously successful strand of work for younger readers. A prodigious creator, who appeared never to have experienced so much as two minutes of writers block (and was accordingly rather contemptuous of that concept and those who complained of it), Terry was producing two books per year and occasionally finding room to squeeze in a third. The popularity of his work was immense, and its ubiquity was legendary: it was frequently said that no train anywhere in Britain was permitted to run until it was established that at least one passenger on board was reading a Terry Pratchett.

Inevitably success at such dizzying levels brought with it burdens on Terrys time over and above the pressure to deliver further novels. Principally there was the business that came with, as Terry dryly put it, being a nauthor. The business of being a nauthor was, as Terry would explain, different in important ways from the business of being a writer. Indeed,