Forty years ago the harmless-looking Grinny brought taboo-breaking terror to children's bookshelves. Now Fisk is back in print to haunt a new generation
"Beth is right – Grinny isn't real." It's 40 years since the publication of Nicholas Fisk's ingenious children's science fiction novel about what happens when long-lost relative Great Aunt Emma turns up on Timothy and Beth's doorstep, but the title alone is enough to induce nostalgic terrors.
Great Aunt Emma, better known as Grinny, is a stranger to the children, but all she needs to say to adults is "You remember me", and they accept her at once. Gradually, though, we sense that there's something very odd about this "queer old bird": she never talks about the past, she's strangely uninformed about the way the world works and she doesn't smell. It's seven-year-old Beth who first senses that something is not right (cue lashings of 70s-style sexism about female irrationality and intuition), but as the evidence mounts up, older brother Timothy joins in with playing detective. The adults remain oblivious as the children run experiments on Grinny: to test her assumptions, her fears, her powers (in mind-training card games, "she decimated – obliterated – smashed us. Her performance was not merely outstanding but phenomenal. Her memory wasn't just retentive, it was Total Recall"). With superlative pacing, narrated in a nicely pre-adolescent mix of fear and bravado, matters come to a spectacular head.
The genius of Grinny is that the monster arrives in the shape of a little old lady whom nobody can ask to leave: in real life, elderly relatives can often seem, well, alien to the young, with intimacy an obligation rather than a choice. "There was a slight scene last night about kissing GAE goodnight," reports Timothy. "Later I asked what Beth had been pulling faces for and she said, 'Ugh! I hate kissing her, kissing Aunt Emma makes me want to puke!', etc, etc." Grinny's malevolence, and the children's aggression towards her, are both taboo-breaking narrative gambits, and Fisk has gleeful fun with the contrasts between the trappings of old age and the unknowable force behind them. Timothy asks Grinny why only the adults get hypnotised: "'See if you can guess,' she said. Again, her voice had that horrible flirty ring to it, the tone of voice you heard when respectable old ladies try to wheedle shop assistants."
Grinny comes back into print for Fisk's 90th birthday, packaged with its 1984 sequel, You Remember Me!, which puts a prescient emphasis on celebrity worship and jingoism. But these are far from the only gems in Fisk's extensive bibliography. My childhood favourites were Space Hostages, a cold war thriller in which a group of children end up in charge of a spaceship, and A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair, about a future society that clones people from the past. Shuttling between shiny futurist dystopia and cramped second world war sitting room, the latter culminates in an unsettling finale, both tragic and strangely open-ended, that has stayed with me ever since.
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