Until I was ten years old, eating was my favourite activity.

Wait, that's not quite right. That makes it sound as though eating made me feel happy, and it was more complicated than that. Or at least, eating made me happy when I was on my own with a packet of chocolate cookies. Eating meals with my parents was a lot more complicated, especially when my mother was telling the latest maid off for not guessing correctly exactly how my father (whom the new maid had never met before) liked his meals, or when they were arguing over how much I ate.

My mother said that eating was how I dealt with anxiety, and that when I'd learnt to overcome my anxiety, I wouldn't feel the need to eat so much. Well, okay, I was an anxious child. I was anxious because if I didn't eat at least two helpings of everything, my mother would worry that I might be going anorexic, and if I did, my father would worry about how fat I was. I was anxious because at school, if people came to beat me up, I couldn't run away, and if they took my stuff, I couldn't run after them and get it back. I was anxious because I hated games, and I didn't think I could ever get my father to understand that.

'It's because I'm no good at them,' I would say.

'So?' my father would say. 'I wasn't any good at games either, when I was your age, but I loved them all the same. Playing, watching, dreaming of being a professional baseball player when I grew up. Or a basketball player. Or a football player.'

'Why didn't you?' I asked once. It wasn't that my father had gotten fat and lazy or anything, or that he'd had some terrible injury when he was young that stopped him playing. He still went swimming or to the gym every day, and he'd done his best to teach me to throw a football around. He was fit enough that I never wanted to play or go swimming with him, because he was so much better than I'd ever be. He just wasn't interested in being a professional athlete.

'Well, then I discovered books,' my father said. 'And so I became a writer instead.'

That was the other thing about my father (apart from arguing with my mother about everything to do with me, and being away from home a lot, and loving sport when I didn't). He was a writer.

When I was in third grade, I was convinced that my father had written Lord of the Flies. I'd never even read Lord of the Flies, but I knew it was a really famous book and it was my mother's favourite book ever, and when I asked her if I could borrow it for Show And Tell, she almost cried with pride over how intelligent and sophisticated I was. So I stood up in front of the class and told everyone about how my father was a famous writer and he'd written this book with a pig's head on the cover. Everyone just laughed at me, so the next time my father was home, I asked him to come into school himself so that I could show him to everyone instead of just his books.

As you've probably worked out by now, my father was not the author of Lord of the Flies. He just happened to have nearly the same name. He did write Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Marathon Man, and the movie versions of All the President's Men and A Bridge Too Far and The Stepford Wives and very nearly Flowers for Algernon only the director didn't like his version, and dozens more. But, well – with novels, everyone talks about the author. With stage plays, everyone talks about the author and the actors. With movies, they talk about the director and the actors and the producer. So, I got used to the fact that my father was a fairly famous author who wasn't quite as famous as the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies.

Nevertheless, even if writing movie scripts didn't make him all that famous, it did mean he needed to be away from home a lot of the time. I didn't complain. When he came home, he always brought me presents – some candy, though not as much as I'd have liked, but mostly toys and novelties. He didn't complain about how greedy I was to want new toys all the time, and I didn't tell him about constantly needing new stuff because the stuff he'd bought me last time kept getting stolen off me at school.

Still, there are some things that you can't find in Los Angeles that you can in New York. On my tenth birthday, my mother spent a lot of time on the phone to my father, arguing about one of them. All I could hear was the word 'Morgenstern', but I knew it was something to do with Dad's present.

My parents never gave me birthday or Christmas presents together. They'd argue about what I was going to want, and then there'd be Mom's present and Dad's present, and then whoever's present I liked most, the other would get upset. If I liked my mother's present best, my father would storm off to go out for a run until he'd calmed down. If I liked my father's present best, my mother would say, 'Jason, honey, you can be honest about your feelings. You don't have to be polite just to spare Daddy's feelings, because Daddy is supposed to be an adult who can cope with criticism.'

At times like these, I wished my parents would let me pretend to believe in Santa Claus, so that I could just write thank-you letters to Santa for all my presents, but my mother thought that pretending a mysterious man snuck down the chimney every Christmas might traumatise me, so we couldn't do it that way.

My mother's present to me was a bike. It was beautiful, and it had ten gears so that it didn't have to be too hard to pedal, but the best thing about it was that it was something I could do on my own. I didn't have to worry about keeping up with other people, or finding people who would let me play with them. I could just go out and ride it, when I felt like it. I could storm off when I was upset, the way my father did, and nobody could say anything because I was exercising and that was good for me.

Towards the end of the afternoon, a taxi drove up with a paper package with 'To Jason, happy 10th birthday with love from Dad' scribbled on it. The handwriting wasn't my father's, but it was obviously something he had asked one of the second-hand bookstores on Fourth Avenue to send me. I didn't know it then, but he had spent the afternoon calling every second-hand bookstore in New York to ask them about Morgenstern's book. (These days, we'd look on the internet, but this was before the internet.)

I ripped open the brown paper to find an old book with a picture of a hill covered in gallows on the cover.

Because of the time gap between New York and California, and because my father was 'in a story conference' (my mother gave me an odd look when she told me this, as though she didn't really believe it), we had to wait until late in the evening to phone him. I was allowed to stay up until half-past ten, which was two hours later than my usual bedtime. I felt like falling asleep, but I knew my father would be all excited to talk to me, so I didn't want to let him down.

'Hi, Jason? Did you get the book? The Morgenstern?'

'Uh, yes. Thanks, Dad. It's really good.'

'Have you started reading it?'

'Uh, not yet.'

'Look, Jason,' – my father was trying to sound jokey and casual, but this was so important to him that his voice was shaking, 'when I was your age, I got sick for a while, and my father – your grandfather – read that book to me while I was recovering, and – it was the book that made me fall in love with reading. It's still my favourite book, it's been my inspiration in practically everything I've written over the years, and – well, it's the only reminder I still have of my father. I used to ask him to read it to me again and again over the years, even though his English wasn't very good – look, can you just read it and tell me what you think? Please?'

'Okay,' I said.

And I tried. Honestly, I tried. But I just couldn't get into it. It wasn't until December that my father came home, and by then I hoped he'd forgotten all about it. He gave me my homecoming presents, I gave him a welcome-home hug and my mother gave him a welcome-home kiss, and then we sat down to dinner, and it was – well, the way meals with my parents generally were. Before we'd even got to dessert, my mother was onto her 'Honestly, Willy, how can you be so obtuse after being married to a psychiatrist all these years?' rant.

I could see my father itching to say, 'Honestly, Helen, how can you be so obtuse after having been a psychiatrist all these years? You can't keep a maid because you humiliate them in front of the entire family, you tell Jason you'll be upset if he doesn't stuff himself at every meal and then you claim that being fat is his decision – how did you ever even qualify as a psychiatrist?'

I don't know why he didn't – I mean, being a writer means you tend to be good with words. But maybe it was just that, ever the professional, he thought some things were more eloquent for being left hanging in the air unsaid.

So at that point, I piped up with, 'I loved the book, Dad. It's the best book I've ever read.'

'Really?' My father's face lit up. 'What was your favourite part?'

'The werewolf.' This was about the only word in the book that I had been able to make out. Well, it was spelled 'werwolf', but it was near enough.

'A werewolf?' My father blinked. 'I remember some strange creatures, like the ROUS and huge snakes and deadly spiders, but I don't recall werewolves. Was there one in Prince Humperdinck's Zoo of Death?'

'I don't know,' I said.

'Jason did his best to read that book, but he was really struggling,' said my mother. 'I told him that just because you loved German poetry at his age doesn't mean everyone has to.'

'It's not German, it's Florinese,' said my father. 'You know where Florin is, don't you, Jason? It's where your grandfather came from, the same as S. Morgenstern who wrote The Princess Bride. I thought I'd ordered an English translation – I don't know, maybe there isn't an English version, maybe my father was translating from the Florinese as he read it.'

'Yeah, but this is German,' I pointed out. I went to my room to fetch the book, and laid it before my father. 'Gal–gen–lie–der und and-ere ged-itchy von Christian Morgenstern.'

'It's pronounced 'Galgen-lee-der oont anderer gedich-ter,' my father corrected me automatically, and then, 'but you're right. It is German, and it isn't the book I meant to send you at all! Oh, Jason, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!'

I tried to think of a way to make things all right. 'Will you read it to me?' I asked. 'Maybe you can translate it for me, like your dad did for you?'

My father brightened. 'Well – I can try. I mean, the book I meant to give you was an exciting adventure story, it had pirates and fencing and…' he opened the book, looked down at the first poem, and burst out laughing.

'What?' I said.

'Well, the first poem here doesn't have fencing like sword-fighting, but it does have a fence! Not even "fence" as in criminal, just an ordinary wooden picket fence and – oh, that's totally surreal!'

'What happens?' I asked.

'Uh – I'm not sure how to translate it. Maybe we could start with an easier one.' My father turned to the next page, scanned down the very short poem, and chuckled.

'What does it say?' I urged.

'Uh, let's see:

A weasel

perched on an easel

within a patch of teasel.

But why

and how?

The Moon Cow

whispered her reply

one time:

The sopheest-

icated beast

did it just for the rhyme.

I laughed, and my father laughed too. And it may sound strange, considering we'd known each other for ten years, but this was the first time we'd ever both found something funny together. My father was always disappointed when I didn't laugh at his jokes. My mother considered that jokes were a disguised form of aggression, which I'd never understood. Sure, people at school were always doing or saying mean things to me 'just as a joke', but there was never anything very disguised about their aggression. Fifth-graders aren't subtle enough for that. My father sometimes called me mean names as well, like 'sumo baby', but at least he tried not to say it when I was there to hear him, and it wasn't his fault if I sometimes overheard when he thought I was asleep.

But this was different. This was just us being two buddies laughing at a silly poem together. My mother looked a bit disapproving. 'Aren't you a bit grown-up for nonsense rhymes?' she said.

I wondered whether I was, and decided that no, I wasn't too grown-up for rhymes like this one. It was just clever enough not to be babyish, with the creatures in the poem knowing that they were creatures in a nonsense-rhyme, and knowing how silly it was. I didn't know the word 'ironic', and if I had, I would have thought it meant 'sort of like sarcasm only classier', but that poem had irony, and I enjoyed it, even if I didn't know the word for why I liked it.

The next day, while I went out for a bike ride, my father worked on a translation of the first poem, about the picket fence and the architect who stole the spaces from between the bits of wood and built a transparent house out of them. It certainly was surreal – not that I knew what 'surreal' meant either, until my mother had shown me some of her collection of art books.

My father worked on translating that book all through the holiday season, which was fine by me, especially as it meant he didn't have time to come for bike rides with me. I loved my bike, even when it made my legs ache, but I didn't want to have to keep up with a fit adult on an adult-sized bike with bigger wheels. We'd found something we could do together, in reading poems. We didn't need to go for rides together as well.

When my father went back to California after the holiday, he left me behind English translations of seven poems: 'The Picket Fence'; 'The Aesthetic Weasel'; the one beginning 'Set a monument for me,/ built of sugar, in the sea;' 'The Hawkenchick (about a creature which is like a chicken-hawk except that it looks so cute and fluffy that everyone wants to pet it, and it devours them when they get close); 'At the Housefly Planet' (where flies swat and spray humans); 'The Hanged Man's Song to the Hangman's Maid' (which is as macabre as it sounds); and one about a disembodied knee roaming the Earth alone, the only remains of a soldier who had been shot to pieces in battle.

He took the original book back with him, as well as a notepad for drafting translations of the rest. My mother said something to him about, 'That should keep you out of mischief,' but wouldn't tell me what she meant. At any rate, my father worked on the translations in his evenings (my nights), and phoned me nearly every evening (his afternoon) to read out to me what he'd been working on.

When he next came home, he brought with him a copy of The Princess Bride, which was available in English, it turned out. 'It's a bit longer than I remembered,' he explained. 'I think when my father read it to me, he used to skip the boring bits. Would you like me to read it to you like that?'

I said, 'Sure. Have you done the poem about the werewolf yet?'

'That one's real tricky to translate. I think I need to practise on a few of the other punny ones, and come back to "The Werewolf" later. But can I read to you about Buttercup and Westley, now?'

'Yeah, please.'

My mother narrowed her eyes and said, 'Willy, Jason is eleven. He's about to start at middle school. Don't you think he's a bit old for being read bedtime stories?'

'No!' my father and I both said. I knew that most people think being read to is something that only happens until you're through kindergarten, and I knew that if I'd had any friends, I could have lost them if they found out that I liked being read to. But I didn't have any friends. I didn't care. My father hadn't had any friends when he was my age, either, and he'd turned out all right.

So we read The Princess Bride (abridged version), and after we'd finished, my father got on the phone to his agent and arranged to write a movie version. There's a man reading the story to a kid in the movie, too, like my grandfather read it to my father and my father read it to me, except that in the movie it's a grandfather reading it to his grandson. I don't know why my father changed that bit – maybe because he wished I'd had the chance to know my grandfather.

Anyway, you've probably seen the movie and maybe if you loved it, you're wondering if I did too. Well, frankly, it wasn't really my thing. I didn't like Buttercup and couldn't understand what Westley saw in her, and I lost interest in Westley once he started being too superhumanly heroic to be believable, so the only characters I really loved were Inigo and Fezzik. Also, I couldn't understand why everyone acted the way they did. I couldn't understand why, if Vizzini was even one-tenth as clever as he thought he was, he wouldn't see that Westley must have put poison in both goblets but must have drunk the antidote himself first – and why Vizzini wouldn't have knocked the goblets over, gotten out a fresh bottle and pulled the same trick on Westley. I couldn't understand why Buttercup was stupid enough to believe Prince Humperdinck would keep his word, or why Inigo wasted so much time grandstanding when he'd finally come face to face with Count Rugen instead of just stabbing him, and above all, why, when Prince Humperdinck admits to Yellin that he's planning to murder his wife and start a war, why Yellin doesn't just arrest him for treason. I mean, murdering a princess has gotta be treason, right? Sam Vimes in the Discworld books would have definitely have arrested Humperdinck. (It was before the Discworld, but I knew cops were supposed to arrest bad guys.)

Those were the things I argued about when we read it, and my father said, as his father had said to him, 'That's what Morgenstern wrote. Take it up with him, not me.'

I couldn't explain some of the other things I didn't like. I didn't know that what Westley does when he's being tortured is called dissociating, and that it would probably give him Multiple Personality Disorder, but even I could see that he and Buttercup were clinging onto very idealised pictures of each other, and that it didn't make for a healthy relationship. I was only ten, but I'd been brought up by a psychiatrist, remember? Something had to rub off.

The characters in Galgenlieder – which I now knew meant Gallows Songs – did silly things, too, especially Palmström and Korf, like the poem where Palmström gets killed in a road accident and concludes that as he was in a pedestrian area, the car couldn't have been there, therefore he can't have been run over, therefore he isn't dead. But – well, Gallows Songs was unapologetically satire, instead of satire dressed up as a fairy-tale, so it didn't matter. Or rather, Gallows Songs was satire first, so everything else it was, like macabre and haunting and whimsical and sweet, was a bonus.

And, just the way that The Princess Bride was the book that got my father hooked on adventure stories, Gallows Songs was the book that got me hooked on poetry. I knew this would lose me my non-existent friends even faster than liking to be read to, but I didn't care. At first, I read nonsense verse and comic poems – Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Hilaire Belloc, Spike Milligan, Ogden Nash. But I'd discovered a liking for spooky poems too, like Walter de la Mere's traveller trying to keep his appointment with his ghostly listeners; and outright gruesome or morbid ones, like Shakespeare's witches stewing body parts of people from various different ethnic minorities (I could see it was racist, but if evil witches in a play aren't allowed to be racist, who can be?), or T. S. Eliot's drowned Phoenician merchant (I wasn't mature enough to realise quite how anti-Semitic Belloc and Eliot were).

My father never did tell me a poem about a werewolf. Still, there were plenty of other strange creatures in the book, like the banshee who slipped away from her husband and her child to ask the ghost of a teacher to inflect her. The teacher replies that she is a banshee as the subject of a sentence, the banher as the object, and the banhers in the possessive case, and that's all there is. The banshee asks what the plurals are, and the teacher says that he can turn 'ban' into 'bans' but there isn't a plural for 'she' – which makes the banshee very sad, because there's no way to speak about her family.

('Yes, there is!' I protested. 'They'd be "bans-they," wouldn't they? And bans-them and bans-their!'

'I know,' said my father. But the point is that you can't think new thoughts when you're dead. The teacher in the poem had never been asked to inflect a whole family of banshees when he was alive, so now that he's dead, he can't work it out. But you can, and that's the important thing.')

Fortunately, my language teacher in middle school, Frau Müller, wasn't dead, and I enjoyed her lessons a lot. She understood, as many language teachers seem not to, that just learning to talk about ourselves ('Hello, my name is Jason. I am eleven years old. My mother is a psychiatrist and my father is a writer. I have no siblings') quickly gets boring. By seventh grade, she'd moved us on to reading stories. When my daughters started reading German, I gave them Cornelia Funke's books, but this was before Cornelia Funke, so we read Otfried Preußler and Erich Kästner, and Michael Ende. It was after Michael Ende, but not by much; he'd written some of the Jim Button books, but The Neverending Story hadn't even started.

However, in sixth grade we were still learning lists of themed words, such as discussing the seasons and what you can see in each season. ‚Was heißt „Lamm" auf Englisch?' Frau Müller asked.

I knew this one! I had been comparing my father's translations of Christian Morgenstern's poems with the originals, and I knew that the one about Das Geierlamm, cuter relative of der Lämmergeier, translated as 'The Hawkenchick'. So I put up my hand. ‚Es heißt „chick"!' I said.

Everyone burst out laughing. Frau Müller glared at them until they stopped, and drew some sketches of baby animals on the board. A chick was das Küken. Das Lamm was, of course, nothing but a lamb.

I sat there in silence for the rest of the lesson, blushing furiously. I managed to get through the rest of the day somehow, but I kept wondering: why? Had my father set me up to betray me so that I'd fail sixth grade German?

When I arrived home, I went through Galgenlieder, this time not with my father's translations, but with a dictionary. Der Lämmergeier, I confirmed, was nothing more nor less than a lamb-vulture, from die Lämmer (lambs) and der Geier (vulture). Chickens and hawks were not involved.

I shoved the little stapled booklet of my father's translations under my mattress, where I wouldn't be tempted to look at it. Then I read through Galgenlieder with a dictionary, looking up every word one at a time, and writing down a literal translation. I realised that in practically every poem my father had made some changes. Sometimes he'd needed to change things a lot, to make a pun work. For example, in ‚Die Nähe', the Nähe, a 'near' who is sad about never actually reaching her destination, gets changed into a Näherin or seamstress. In the English translation, though, the heroine is a 'Flat' who is unhappy about not having a shapely figure, until she gets changed into a Flatterer and therefore quickly becomes popular. Even the weasel didn't really sit on an easel but on a pebble, because that was what rhymed in German.

Even in the very simple poems, my father had changed things around. For example, one poem was just a baby's lullaby: there's a cloud-sheep in the sky; the sun gobbles the sheep up; the sun's mate, the moon, is angry and chases the sun away. That poem always made me think of my family, with my father telling me off for eating so much, and my mother telling him off for nagging me, and my father storming out. But anyway, he hadn't exactly needed to change much, even to make it rhyme; after all, 'sheep' still rhymes with 'sleep', and 'hound' with 'ground', whether you're speaking English or German. But even there, in the German the sun was female and the moon was male, and my father's translation had turned it round. Why? Why did he need to change anything? Why did I feel angry with him for changing anything?

It's like when they make movie adaptations of books; they always change things, like my father making it a grandfather instead of a father reading to the boy. Sometimes the movie is practically nothing to do with the book apart from the characters having the same names, like with Disney's Jungle Book, where Baloo becomes a fun lazy hippy instead of a strict teacher, and Kaa becomes evil when he's good in the book. But sometimes it's just pointless silly changes, like in the book 101 Dalmatians where Pongo's wife is just called Missis, and then later Pongo and Missis's humans adopt a stray dog and name her Perdita, but the movie version gave that name to Pongo's wife, so it's confusing talking about the book to someone who's only seen the movie.

And then – sometimes there are movies that are inspired by books, instead of claiming to be movies of books. When my daughters were young (yeah, I know I'm telling a story about decades ago when I was a kid, but that doesn't mean I haven't had a life since then), I took them to see Frozen. Now, the Disney Corporation could have made a movie of The Snow Queen, and it could have been good or, knowing Disney, it could have stunk. But instead, they made a movie about what it's like being a snow queen, and what it's like having a snow queen as a sister.

So, going back to the past, my father's banshee poem was a bit like that. He couldn't simply translate the one about the werewolf:

‚Der Werwolf' sprach der gute Mann,

‚des Weswolfs, Genetiv sodann,

‚dem Wemwolf, Dativ, wie man's nennt,

‚den Wenwolf, - damit hat's ein End.'

So, he didn't. Instead, he wrote a poem like it, about another monster with grammatical problems.

By the time I'd thought all this through (which took several months of being in a foul mood, rather than the few hours that it looks like as I've described it), I understood. Translating – whether translating from a novel to a movie, or from German to English, or translating between the way I saw the world, the way my mother saw it, and the way my father saw it – could only ever be approximate. Even though my father and I had learnt the language of poetry together, his mind would be translating it into Williamish while I was translating it into Jasonian. My mother thought she understood her patients, and maybe she even thought she understood me, and my father said she understood him all too well. But even if she did, she was translating what she thought she understood about us into psychoanalese, which meant that none of us could understand what she explained about why we behaved the way we did.

I had already found out that I loved poetry, and that I loved learning languages. But this was when I realised that I wanted to be a translator.

I didn't tell my father about my dream, because I feared that if I did, he'd give me The Talk. Not the one about how babies are made (we'd had an apartment full of picture-books about that ever since I was in kindergarten). No, the one I feared was the one about, 'Well, son, life isn't fair. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional baseball player, and I didn't get my wish, so if you set your heart on becoming a translator and do everything you can to learn languages, you probably won't get your dream, either, or if you do, it won't make you happy. Look at me: I'm in a cold, loveless marriage, and your mother and I could spend money on a divorce or on marriage guidance counselling, but it wouldn't make us any happier, so it's best just to accept that we don't love each other and leave it at that. Look at you: you're a fat, spoilt little brat and no matter what you do, inside you'll always be that fat, spoilt brat, because nothing ever really changes.'

I don't know whether my father would have said exactly that, but I didn't know him all that well, and I didn't quite trust him not to break my heart like that, and think he was being a responsible parent for doing so. You see, the thing adults forget is that there's a good reason why kids think life can change. It's because it does. Think about it: you're born not knowing how to make eye contact, how to feed yourself, how to use your hands and feet, anything. So you have to figure out everything for yourself – how to sit up, how to crawl, how to walk – because the adults don't remember how they learned it, to be able to tell you, and if they did you wouldn't understand what they were saying, because you'd learnt to recognise Mommy and Daddy's voices while you were still in the womb, and now you're outside and can see what they're pointing at you're starting to learn what some of the words mean, but not to that extent yet. So you teach yourself how to walk, and how to say a few important words like 'no!' and 'doggie,' and that's just in the first year. I haven't even got onto all the stuff you learn between one and three, or between three and six, or six and eleven. And if you've got any sense, one of the important things you learn is that parents aren't always right.

So I didn't tell my parents what I planned to do, but just that I wanted to study modern languages at college. And of course that meant I had to spend time travelling in Europe, and I realised how many books by English-speaking authors you can find in translation in German bookstores, and how few books by foreign authors I generally saw in American bookstores, and then I knew I had to be a translator.

And since then? Well – I lived happily ever after, I guess. Well, more happily than my parents, or the sun and the moon in 'The Gallows Child's Lullaby', and more happily than Buttercup's parents, and probably more happily than Westley and Buttercup did, either. It helps that my work mostly takes place in my office at home rather than in Los Angeles surrounded by starlets, but mostly it helps that I love my wife and I don't need to flirt with starlets when she's around. Flirting with tartlets (and other types of pastries and cookies) is more of a temptation, which is probably why my wife won't let me or the kids have them in the house. We're allowed yoghurt (which the three females all love and I can't stand) and fruit (which we all snack on constantly), and we're allowed dessert on special occasions and when we go out. But it doesn't matter so much now. Chocolate still tastes good when you're old, but not as good as it did when you were a kid. But words taste even better.

Author's note: Christian Morgenstern and his poetry really do exist. The translations and imitations of them that William Goldman writes in this story were in real life written by Max Knight and Karl Ross. However, William Goldman did write Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Marathon Man, and the screenplays of All the President's Men and A Bridge Too Far and The Stepford Wives and many others (and in our world, he wrote the original novel The Princess Bride). But not Lord of the Flies.