Gallutians was inspired by a story in the Bunty a very, very long time ago, which was simply about two aliens in a shed, watching two young people holding hands in the park. The aliens had crash-landed on Earth and found it a frightening, unfamiliar place until they saw the two humans and realised that we shared their capacity to love. In the last frame of the comic strip story it showed the aliens as two blobs with tentacles entwined.

 

A simple, beautiful idea about not judging by appearances. My version added the issue of 1960s racism into the mix, and Terry and Cassie as teenagers, falling in love in Battersea Park on their way home from school, desperate to be with each other, but afraid of being found out.

 

The Racial Preservation Society, is one of the organisations that eventually merged into the British National Front, the better known right wing party. The BNF didn’t come along until the late 1960s, by which time Terry and Cassie were travelling the universe with Chrístõ. Leaflets about how sexual intercourse with coloured girls could be detrimental to the health or how the watering of pure bloodlines would destroy the empire were more or less standard fare, by all accounts. I must admit to doing very little research into right wing racism apart from the foundation dates, which were all I really needed for accuracy.

 

What I DID research quite deeply was Battersea Park, which is a fascinating place with a lot of history and some very interesting features. In the end, though, when I wrote the story, it didn’t really need a lot of the detail. I do have in mind the possibility of another story set there, either for Theta Sigma or one of the other story sets, which uses more of its features.

 

Essentially, though, this was the same story I read years ago, given a bit more detail and finished off by a quiet evening in Li Tuo’s flat where Chrístõ explains who the Gallutians are.