PORKY (Arrow £5.99)
This is my fifth novel. It came to me quite suddenly,
when I was driving towards London and passed a smallholding
– a bungalow surrounded by muddy fields, the sort that
have old buses and lorry containers in them.. Maybe there
were pigs too, I can’t remember. But it was near Heathrow
Airport and I saw, very clearly, a girl stepping out of the
house. She was dressed as an air stewardess and I knew that
her father had been having sex with her since she was 11 and
the only was she could escape would be to fly away. She wasn’t
there, of course – she was only in my head. But I had
been thinking a great deal about incest – this was in
1981, when it was little spoken of – and suddenly the
whole story told itself to me. The girl, Heather, told it
to me. I just had to write it down, which I did, in a rush;
it took about six months, flat out.. That hinterland around
an airport, a place for transients, is a strong presence in
the book too. I was, and remain, haunted by Heather and her
story, and still wonder about her, all these years later.
She would be a middle aged woman now.
At school they called her Porky on account of the pigs her
family kept outside the bungalow near Heathrow. But she felt
no different – not until she realized she was losing
her innocence in a way that none of her friends could possibly
imagine. Only a child robbed of her childhood can know too
late what it means to be loved too little and loved too much…
“At once eerily exuberant and bleak, this ia a compassionate,
tough book.”
(Observer)
“Deborah Moggach conveys with chilling skill the process
by which a fundamentally bright, decent child becomes infested
by corruption.”
(Spectator)
“It illuminates with great compassion how love can
so easily go off the rails.”
(Daily Mail)
“Extraordinarily skilful.”
(Anita Brookner).
224 pages (1 October, 1984)
Publisher: Penguin Books; ISBN: 0140069437
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