Thread by @neilphilipmyth, In May 1983 I interviewed #PhilippaPearce about her latest novel The Way [...]

In May 1983 I interviewed #PhilippaPearce about her latest novel The Way to Sattin Shore. It has many of the crisp and subtle qualities of her writing, but some flaws too. Here are some things she said about it. @whatSFSaid @MrCornishTweets

[I had expressed doubts about the backstory that the lead character Kate discovers] "I was very conscious of this, that it was all seen from her point of view, and this inhibited me from really examining and projecting for instance the motivations of the other characters.

But in fact children, they're very sensitive I think to adult character and adult mood, but actual motivation I think often escapes them, and this is what I had to cope with, that she can't quite see why it happens. There are certain things there which surely

you could give an adult interpretation to which she doesn't, for instance the relationship - and when I say all this I am very conscious of this sort of weakness, but I hoped that this was what I was achieving - the relationship between the killed brother and Arnold.

Arnold is someone who is seeking a homosexual object in his youth, and that he finds this boy and falls in love with him, and is rejected, and the boy obviously has great charm. and he's presumably, probably bisexual... Is this not something you can believe?

I mean, did you see all that? ... It's something that the child would not see."
[I said I thought it rather stagey, especially the scene where Arnold confesses his crime]
"Ah. I was rather pleased with that. I was pleased with it as an atmosphere.

And yet I can see that Arnold West is not a fully developed character. I couldn't do it. And I don't think it was just because I personally couldn't do it, I think it was almost undoable in terms of what I'd set myself."

[I was convinced by the relationships between children and adults and children and children, but not those between adults and adults] "Yes. That's an awful fault that I'm not capable of doing adult relationships. And perhaps I was trying to do it here.

Certainly I was taking the child back in her imagination into a totally adult past in which the children played no part. And in previous books the adults have been just circumstances of the children's lives.

They haven't been fully developed, or they've been developed at a rather low level."

"And if you do things from a child's point of view, adults do look different, don't they?"

[Children in her books are often debarred from direct sensory pleasure, and only experience it in rare moments]

"Their birthright. I think they acknowledge this birthright."

[Sattin Shore p.44, 'Kate sat in silence...' an example of this]

"A heightened moment."

"But you see it's partly because she's being estranged from Ran, because he's going away from her. She has only just acquired this friend, it's a very precious friendship, and this sort of socialising combined with the absolute joy of tobogganing,

which she didn't think she was going to have at all - yes, you're right."

"But it's all so immediate. This book [Sattin Shore], if it fails, it fails because it tries to penetrate into a past which isn't made completely credible. That's what you're saying, isn't it?"

"This was a problem of the whole construction of the book, that it ... When she discovers him, discovers that her father is alive, and confronts him with her grandmother really, this confrontation over the body of the mother, that's really the end of the book, and yet as you

say it's too easy. And all the people who read it before it went to the printers picked a hole here, a hole there. They were all different criticisms, but they all amounted to the same kind of thing: is this really likely, the relationship with the adults or the adult situation.

And the answer is really, 'Not as I can present it, this is all I can do,' because it still has to be from the viewpoint of a child, and if I had gone on to present the father and his relationship with his children and his wife and so on, and show all that and how it develops,

it would have pulled the book completely out of shape. It would hardly have existed as her story anymore, would it?"

"What I really started with was the feeling of somebody missing. That crucial time when she's going down to Sattin Shore to find him.

somebody's identity which should have been filled by somebody. She wasn't ever aware at first, and then she became deeply aware, tremendously aware of this gap, and one the gap is filled, that's the end of the story.

But I do agree that it has these awful weaknesses around the edges."

"I suppose I wanted to present him as somebody rather vacillating, a weak character. He'd run away. I remember talking to a coroner when I was checking up on all this sort of thing, and I said,

'Do people ever, perhaps they think they're going to be suspected for instance of murder, do they ever skedaddle?' He said, 'You'd be amazed at the silly things people do, which only makes it worse, usually.'

And so I imagined somebody who'd lost his head, and who did this - I hope it had a meaning, that if he could say he was dead, when his family, his wife and his mother-in-law had assumed he was alive, he would have more freedom of movement."

[Does she do a lot of research?]

"Very little. And mostly after the event to check things. I do go - Sattin Shore is based on a real place - I did go down three times in the summer to see it in, what was it, about April, June, August, to correspond with the times in the book."

"It's called Stutton Shore, and it's on the river Stour in Suffolk, and it's just like that. Well, in a slight way I exaggerated. You do see the estuary, certainly when the tide's in, you see it from the distance. But you can't, you're not allowed to go down by car.

You can cycle, or you can walk, and it's a long way and therefore it's rather deserted, and when you get there it has no particular beauty to it. It has nothing to it except, I think, an extraordinary mystery: really, a strange place."

[Reminiscent of Wings of Courage?]

"Not at all. It must have been a coincidence. Because this has been lying around in my mind, certainly Stutton Shore as a setting for something, and going down to meet someone there, has been lying around in my mind for fifteen years or more,

long before I read Wings of Courage."

"Can I go back to Sattin Shore? You're awfully good, and I think other people are like this, at seeing symbolisms and meanings and things, and I think this is absolutely right, but I have a theory that some writers, and I'm one of them,

we're not nearly as clever, consciously, as that. In Sattin Shore, the shore of the estuary represents something special, it's the past, she's finding something and eventually she finds her father there, and as I say I was haunted by the place for many years,

by the landscape of it, and it was an estuary of course, and then I describe it and bring it in, and then I think it's almost the last scene, she, I describe, I nearly said she describes, how the waters of the sea come up and the waters of the river come down,

and you can't tell where they meet, they mingle absolutely silently and harmoniously, and I suddenly realised - I don't know whether it was luck or prescience of what - that I'd chosen the perfect setting, an estuary with the sea coming up and the river coming down,

and a reconciliation of things, of nature, of forces, which is just what was needed there. But I hadn't planned that. It was just a lucky strike."

"I've always found landscape the natural place to start with.

I'm sure you've had the sort of dream where you see a landscape, something perhaps quite unfamiliar, and if it's a nasty dream you at once have the feeling that something unpleasant is going to happen, it's that sort of landscape. And I see certain landscapes in which I think

something important will happen, but the only thing is, they must be familiar to me, they can't just be 'a landscape'. Though I did once do a short story based on a landscape I didn't know well, but Stutton Shore I know very well, and around here of course.

And perhaps it's something to do with, going back to children's very acute sensuous awareness of things, that places area very important, or they were to me in my childhood and I expect this is the same for most children.

You know how children in their homes, they know minutely which is their mug or their chair, by a hair crack or a chip off or something like that, and the exasperated parents can't see any difference, but the children do."

"Another thing about The Way to Sattin Shore. Someone said to me it seemed unlikely that the children hadn't asked more about their father, they seemed so vague about what had happened. In my experience children don't ask questions."

"I do think that children - and possibly adults too - live much more in a fantasy world than most people will ever acknowledge.

This is what I was thinking of partly in Sattin Shore when the girl stops at the telephone box. She's partly physically exhausted and partly because she's physically exhausted, she thinks let's relax into wishful thinking, and then has to come to in the end."

Blimey, that took a lot of tweets. Congratulations to anyone who got to the end!

I got the feeling that a lot of Sattin Shore had deep private resonance for Philippa that she wasn't going to share with the reader or an interviewer.

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