Some background and little extract, read by me:
I don’t think the above photo was taken in 1983, the year when my new novel is set. It looks much more 1982 to me. I very much doubt it was earlier than that. Yes, the hair and clothes might look a bit more late 70s, to some, but you can probably put that down to the place - central Nottingham - and the fact that a lot of the children featured are wearing clothes bought at jumble sales or handed down from older siblings or the kids of their parents’ friends. Whatever the case, this photo is where the book begins. Not exactly here, at Claremont Primary School, but at a school not totally unlike it, at the beginning of 1983, as seen through the eyes of a seven year-old pupil not unlike me. The little boy enjoys going to his school a lot. And I enjoyed writing the book a lot. Looking at the above photo, you will probably gain a fair understanding as to why.
I remember all the faces in this photo of my class at Claremont but not all the names. I can’t recall, for example, what the kid on the far right with the diamond jumper was called, which seems a shame. But that’s my friend Danny McGuire on the front row, far right, with his arm around our friend Emma Beldham, who, apart from me, was the only other pupil at the school at the time who had a mum who taught there. Directly behind them is Zoe Gardener, who I thought of as very pretty but a bit intimidating - an impression that, when I bumped into her nine years later, smoking in a nightclub by the Nottingham & Beeston Canal, I was not dissuaded from. Danny, whose mum was part of the Greenham Common protests of the time, grew his hair very long after this and was often called “Neil” after Nigel Planer’s hippie in the TV show The Young Ones. I saw him and Benji Baptiste (top row, fifth from right) at an open day for a sixth form college when I was 16 but was too scared to speak to them because - from across the room - they seemed impossibly tall and cool. But when I was finally reunited with Danny, 15 years on from that, he was, confusingly, a similar tallish height to me, rather than the record-breaking height of a human giant. Sadly we lost touch again after that so in the unlikely event that you’re out there reading this, Danny, hello. Also, Emma, thank you for telling a mutual friend that I used to smell nice. I’m afraid I can’t take the credit for that. I’m sure it was down to a combination of my mum and dad’s incense and the fact that my clothes sometimes came to me secondhand via Jane Hamshaw, who was a few years older than me, and also smelled nice.
That’s me in the back row, by the way, fifth from the left, being strangled by my best friend Edward, who is doing google-eyes which suggest he too is being strangled, even though he isn’t, unless the person strangling him happens to be one of the school’s many ghosts. The school had been used as a hospital during the First World War and definitely had ghosts, we were sure of it, fascinated by it, especially me and Emma, as we wandered the building’s echoey corridors, freaking ourselves out, while our teacher mums worked late. But what it had far more of than ghosts was inspiring teachers. It was not a scary place but was a place of great happiness and child-centred learning and humour and creative freedom. What I see when I look at that photo above - with its grinning faces and cheap colourful un-uniforms - is a small, happy, egalitarian middle-English riot. That small riot was a result of a moment in history, in a particular kind of city, at a particular time in the evolution of pre-teen education, with a particular kind of aroma wafting around that was half post-punk half post-hippie. But it was also the result of a particular collection of inspiring people chosen by another person - the school’s head, Jean Penchion - and all those people’s visions working in harmony under – actually, no, that’s not correct: not under, alongside – the authority of that person’s vision. Not a vision under any official educational banner – and definitely not one of those self- consciously ‘alternative’ schools – but a vision nonetheless.
1983 is not just a book about a lovely school, and the kids who go to it. It’s a book about mining, aliens, the Nottinghamshire landscape, a maker of robots, what the future once was and what childhood once was and can never be again and what childhood still is, to an extent. When my publisher first read it, he said it was “Alan Sillitoe rewritten by Kurt Vonnegut”. It isn’t. It’s me, rewritten by me. But of course I’m far from unhappy with that description. 1983 is quite weird and silly and I would no way have believed any traditional publisher would have had anything to do with it, ten years ago. But I crowdfund my books these days with Unbound and they, and even more importantly the readers who kindly order the books in advance, mean I can write weird silly stuff like this. I feel like it’s a very Claremont thing to do: outside the mainstream, unconventional - but not in a recognised conventionally unconventional way - following your own path. So in a way, Claremont has inspired the book twofold, in subject and attitude. Which is why I decided that the dedication in the front of it should be to the people who were there during my childhood, moulding me in ways which are still evident today.
ANYWAY. This is all also an excuse to post the little audio extract from the book above, to give you a tiny flavour of it (just one of its flavours really because I think of it as a bit like those Tuscan ice cream cones with the multiple compartments that I mention in the extract), and to tell you that, if you would like to reserve a signed first edition hardback and get your name listed in it as a supporter via this link, the deadline for that is midnight on February 11th. But of course you can still pre-order the book - without getting your name listed in it - at any time right up to publication in August.
August! I’m sorry. I know. It seems ever such a long way away. Too long. By the time 1983 comes out, I’ll have written another novel (which I’m also dying to tell you about but can’t, not just yet). Hopefully, I’ll have started the one after that, too. Deferred gratification is a central part of the experience of being an author. That’s just the way it works. I don’t make the rules. I just let my strange brain - the one moulded by Claremont and my shockingly (especially after that) crap and apathetic secondary school and my family and my friends and dropping out of university and trying to read more good books and listening to psychedelic music and lots of other things until, finally, around seven years ago, it realised it could finally write what it really wanted to write - where it needs to go, and keep writing the books. But I am glad to be able to say, 22 years after first seeing my name on a shelf in a bookshop*, the process is richer and more fulfilling than I could have ever imagined it to be when I started out.
*I mean on a book by me that had been published. Somebody didn’t just walk into a bookshop and randomly put my name on a shelf, for me to subsequently find there. That would have been super fucking weird and disturbing.
A few other recent pieces you might have missed:
I pledged the minute you announced it of course and I am so excited about this book! 😍
In 1983 I visited England for the last time. The previous trip was in 1955 with my mum showing me off to all my aunts, uncles and cousins. That year is a special time for me, too. I have been loving all your posts and will consider a paid sub, but how can you make any profit mailing two books to the USA?