Bang on the nail, madam. Right on every count.


She gave me a stare, at first appraising, then bewildered, then accusing. "You're too young!" she cried. "You couldn't have written that book - you weren't there." It was true, I was not in Palestine in the last days of the British Mandate. "Then none of this happened to you?" she said. "Nothing. I made it all up. It's fiction."

One of the worst things about misery memoirs (apart from the fact that they're unreadable; so the writer had a lousy childhood, why should I give a damn?) is that they seem to have confused readers about what to expect from fiction, particularly when they encounter the "I" voice, which against their apparent expectations is almost always a lie. Not only that, there seems to be a feeling in some readers that fiction based on truth is intrinsically superior to invention, which has always seemed to me if anything the reverse of the case.

I sometimes get queries from A-level students along the lines of "in your poem about the sandman, who's the woman on the beach?" If I reply; well, she's the poem's protagonist, I get the comeback "no, I mean who is she in your life, is it you, your mother, a friend?" When, like Grant, I reply "she's someone I made up for the purposes of the poem", I sense disappointment, as I do if I explain that even when poems are partly based on truth, writers monkey around with the facts, change he to she, set it in a different place, write a better ending than real life did.

The poem I get the most queries about is
The Beautiful Lie

He was about four, I think... it was so long ago.
In a garden; he'd done some damage
behind a bright screen of sweet-peas
- snapped a stalk, a stake, I don't recall,
but the grandmother came and saw, and asked him
"Did you do that?"

Now, if she'd said why did you do that,
he'd never have denied it. She showed him
he had a choice. I could see in his face
the new sense, the possible. That word and deed
need not match, that you could say the world
different, to suit you.

When he said "No", I swear it was as moving
as the first time a baby's fist clenches
on a finger, as momentous as the first
taste of fruit. I could feel his eyes looking
through a new window, at a world whose form
and colour weren't fixed

but fluid, that poured like a snake, trembled
around the edges like northern lights, shape-shifted
at the spell of a voice. I could sense him filling
like a glass, hear the unreal sea in his ears.
This is how to make songs, create men, paint pictures,
tell a story.

I think I made up the screen of sweet-peas.
Maybe they were beans, maybe there was no screen:
it just felt as if there should be, somehow.
And he was my - no, I don't need to tell that.
I know I made up the screen. And I recall very well
what he had done.



Kids invariably want to know who was who; was the grandmother yours (one asked if I was the grandmother!); was the boy your brother. I explain, patiently, that the whole point of the poem is that you can't ever know; the writer is a liar and you have to accept that, because the lie is the way into the kingdom of story. But I sense that they want desperately to pigeonhole things, perhaps because exam questions are slanted that way.