The Man With the Red Umbrella

For years I wanted to write about a man with an umbrella. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know what he wanted. I just had the umbrella, and I couldn’t get rid of it.

The name came later, and it came from Dickens. In Martin Chuzzlewit there’s a woman called Sarah Gamp — a nurse, and not much of one — and Dickens gives her an umbrella so memorable that for a while afterward English people called an umbrella a “gamp.” I took the umbrella and the name and left the rest of her where she was.

That gave me a last name. The first name took longer, and it arrived by accident.

I’d started writing stories about a character who turns up in a child’s life out of nowhere — no warning, no explanation — and helps them do the thing they’d set out to do. A girl who needs to get down a river. A boy building something too big for him. He shows up at random.

And that was the name. It had been sitting in the description the whole time.

So he’s Random Gamp: a Victorian gentleman in a top hat and a coat with tails, carrying a bright red umbrella through country that has never seen his like. He doesn’t ask children what they’ve done to deserve his help. He doesn’t explain where he came from. He arrives right on time, and then he’s gone.