The
first part of Friendship 7 came about because I wanted to do a story involving
the First Doctor and Susan, so I researched the space programme from the
period when they were living on Earth. I came across the Wikipedia entry
for the Mercury-Atlas 6 flight, popularly known as Friendship 7, which
fitted the period perfectly, and was significant as the first manned orbit
of Earth. Reading through it, I found the references to sand storms and
crossing from day to night, and the people of Perth
turning on all their lights to greet Glenn
as he passed over Australia.
The line “. “Mum doesn’t even leave the carport light
on for us.” Just wrote itself at that point, and it was so easy
to describe the boys matching the course of Friendship 7.
Crossing the Pacific,
Glenn DID tell ground control
that he was seeing “by “thousands of little specks, brilliant
specks, floating around outside the capsule." And their explanation
WAS ice crystals. But when I read that bit I had my story. They weren’t
ice crystals. They were alien entities. And Chris
and Davie
went into the fray, attracting them to their TARDIS and preventing history
from being upset. Their emergency landing took them, of course, to the
most obvious place in the 1960s, outside a certain junk yard. It had also
decided to disguise itself as a police public call box. And so young Susan,
when she came out of the yard, was BOUND to investigate it. That led to
the sequence of events in which Chris was left to look after his mum,
who is, at this point, a teenage girl who for a short while seems slightly
attracted to him, forcing him to admit who he is in case of any embarrassment.
Davie, meanwhile, is with The Doctor in the
Gothic TARDIS, and the crotchety old man is starting to come out of himself
as he enjoys the thrill of the chase he once knew.
Of course, the
two of them had to forget the whole incident. But the twins make sure
the memory is only suppressed, not erased, and finally, they get to talk
about it with their mum and great-grandfather, who, in this story, have
been allowed to be wonderfully cosy and happy with each other.
The
first part of Friendship 7 came about because I wanted to do a story involving
the First Doctor and 
