Hindsight Page 20
I felt extremely reluctant. The question of truth haunted me. I will not say that the ghost of Dobbs stood at my shoulder, but the metaphor will do. I believed that I had come as close as is possible to the truth of a set of past events, and now I was being asked to infect that truth with lies.
My income tax demand came in. The rates had gone up. The clutch of my car burnt out. A gale caused a chimney-stack to fall through my roof, disclosing old timber-rots which the insurance did not cover. I settled down and started to tamper with the truth. I wrote this book.
So how much truth does it contain? Quite a lot, really. Certainly much more than I would ever have expected. But a price has had to be paid, in that I cannot afford to indicate to anyone which bits are true and which are not. If I were to go through someone’s copy and underline all the true passages, he would then be able to deduce from these, and from the nature of the passages where I have had to depart from the truth, much of what actually happened; and in that case the whole point of altering anything would be lost. So the price of my publishing as much truth as is possible is that I have to do so in a form where it all has to be read as fiction.
Though it worked out in the end, the process of alteration was extraordinarily hard going. I often felt the whole web coming apart in my hands. Yes, early in the ‘novel’ there is an account of a girl called Cora making a string-pattern which she named ‘Starfish’ and which then at the loosing of a single loop unravelled into nothing. Truth is such a web, all its nodes interdependent. Let one fact slip and the rest will go. But I managed to catch enough of them to make my own pattern—if not the original ‘Starfish’ then at least ‘Eskimos Running Away’.
The difficulty was not merely technical. There were days, weeks, when I nearly gave up. But, still speaking in metaphors, I had unseen help. The monitory presence of Dobbs at my elbow changed; he would at least have understood about the income tax, but that is not what I mean. Other presences joined him, Steen and Daisy O’Connell and writers and artists whose names I do not know, who had had life sucked out of their work, books never finished or stillborn, years of creative work aborted or not begun, because of Molly Benison. Was she to do this to me also, even to my tiny volume? She must, somewhere, be defeated.
All very fanciful. Romantic twaddle. Death to decent writing, maybe. But it got me through, and you have this book in your hands despite her.
About the Author
Peter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.
The recipient of many awards, Dickinson has been shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice. The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was also the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for two books running: Skin Deep (1968) and A Pride of Heroes (1969).
A collection of Dickinson’s poetry, The Weir, was published in 2007. His latest book, In the Palace of the Khans, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.
Dickinson has served as chairman of the Society of Authors and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by Peter Dickinson
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-5040-0486-2
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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