The author of The House at the Edge of the World explains how her Baileys prize longlisted story grew from teenage years in Devon, resisting cultural isolation
In the early 1980s, when I was studying for my O-levels, my friends and I were members of CND, (that’s the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, for those of you who weren’t about for the cold war). There was a CND lapel badge we wore (badges were big in the 80s). We held earnest meetings in living rooms vacated by sympathetic parents, and worried about mutually assured destruction (MAD). As well as being concerned by the nuclear threat, we were implacably opposed to apartheid, frightened by the hole in the ozone layer, and concerned about the damage inflicted by multinational corporations on subsistence farmers in what we still called the third world. We listened to the Jam, the Clash and Steel Pulse, and were united in our hatred of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
At the same time, none of the issues we felt so anxious and passionate about actually touched on our lives. We were growing up in east Devon, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and spent our weekends swimming in the sea, or camping on Dartmoor or sailing dinghies on the estuary. None of us, as far as I’m aware, had ever been anywhere in “the third world” and, despite attending a massive comprehensive school with two-and-a-half thousand pupils, everyone in our world was white – apart from one half-Jamaican boy, a cousin of a friend of mine, who was dispatched from London to the country for a year to get him out of some never-specified (but almost certainly incredibly glamorous) trouble.
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