‘A walking, talking, breathing solid ghost. Not the ghost of someone dead. I am still alive. His flesh is my flesh, his heartbeat is my heartbeat. Because he is me. But so long ago . . .’
In Pig Ignorant (Slightly Foxed Edition No. 65), we follow the best-selling children’s writer Nicholas Fisk to the dingy jazz-filled streets of Blitz-era London as he stumbles into adulthood.
It’s all embarrassment and uncertainty for the third-person narrator Nick (real name David Higginbottom) as he searches for an identity, from the kid who’s jeered at by bullies as a ‘Muvvers’ darling’ to the shy, gangling young adult affecting to smoke a pipe because the girl he fancies doesn’t like cigarettes.
Though Pig Ignorant is lightly written, inevitably the big subjects – sex and death – lurk beneath the wry humour, as Nick gets his first job with a theatrical agency and finds his faltering way into Soho jazz clubs where he moonlights as a guitarist. Soon there are girls, idealized and distant in this world before the Pill, impossible to understand and sexually dementing.
Death comes in the form of the Blitz, the ‘clamped-down dark of the blackout’, the night when the family home is nearly hit, and the day when Nick sees the ghastly dust-whitened face of an elderly man whose torso is pulled out of the rubble. Pig Ignorant ends with another rite-of-passage, Nick’s call-up into the RAF. It’s a brilliant book, the story not only of the making of a man but also of the making of a writer.
Read on to view an extract from Pig Ignorant which details Nick’s first foray into the world of work. And, please scroll on further down the page for more coming-of-age reading recommendations.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF staff
Isabel, Rebecca, Ruth, Edie & Jennie
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