...surely anyone could see that this new girl was . . . well, what? I wanted to say she was a liar, although I couldn’t think of any actual lies she’d told. It was more that she was somehow all lies, I thought: made of lies; one big lie. [loc. 1399]
The setting is June 1972, somewhere in the south of England. Deborah (who's looking back from the vantage point of her sixties) is one of a close-knit group of girls in their last year of primary school. Deborah is the clever one: come September, she'll be going to grammar school while all the rest of them go to the local comprehensive. She has a secret crush on Tutankhamun, a widowed Scottish mother given to gnomic pronouncements ('the way to make me strong, she thought, was to make me scared') and a love of swimming.
Then comes Sarah-Jayne, whose family moves into the Vicarage -- which allegedly has its own swimming pool -- and everything begins to change. Sarah-Jayne has a fancy haircut and a red trouser suit and proclaims herself in love with David Cassidy. Sarah-Jayne goes out for lunch with her sister's boyfriend Max, who lets her drink wine and buys her presents. Sarah-Jayne tries to teach the other girls to levitate. And Sarah-Jayne, Deborah realises, doesn't know the secret at the heart of her own family.
In some respects, nothing much happens in this novel: it's a vignette of rural life and undercurrents that are only vaguely apprehended by the narrator. In other ways, it's an unsettling story about lies and sexuality and adolescent friendships. I'm just a little younger than Deborah and I recognised so much of my own childhood in this novel: even the characters' names were the names of girls in my class at school. There's a marvellous passage in the first chapter (it convinced me to buy the book) about the underlying horrors of the Seventies: Deborah concludes the litany of dangers with "I’m only half joking when I say I’m surprised that any of us lived to tell the tale."
Reading this was weirdly nostalgic, but also horrific. It made me wonder about the secrets I didn't know in our small village, the kinds of secrets that Deborah observes but doesn't understand. And it makes me glad that I was blithely ignorant.
I’ve been lucky, I’ve led a sheltered life and to this day no one else has ever looked at me the way that man did ... He knew before I did that I could see through him. Which meant I was in his way. [loc. 3271]
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