Nicholas Fisk | Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Grinny, [78] 75; Pig Ignorant, [80] 13

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Pig Ignorant | New from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘I believe we all have a certain time in our lives that we’re good at. I wasn’t good at being a child.’ The epigraph from Victoria Wood to this endearingly honest memoir says it all. In it the best-selling children’s writer Nicholas Fisk lays bare his teenage soul as he beckons us into the world of late 1930s suburbia where he grew up.

The In-Between Years

Sam Leith on Nicholas Fisk, Pig Ignorant

Nicholas Fisk (1923–2016) is a half-forgotten name now, and his memoir Pig Ignorant is a wholly forgotten book. It deserves not to be, and he deserves not to be. Fisk was a bestselling children’s writer through my own ’70s and ’80s childhood and was described by one critic as ‘the Huxley-Wyndham-Golding of children’s literature’. But if he is remembered now, it’s for his science fiction and only vaguely, and only by people about my age. There’s the Bradburyesque alien invasion horror Grinny (see SF no.78) and its sequel You Remember Me , the disconcerting genetic-engineering story A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair , and Trillions , in which tiny, collectively intelligent alien particles fall to earth like snow. In his most memorable stories the surface appearance of the world masks something darker and stranger. There’s a world behind the world.

The Stuff of Nightmares

Sam Leith on Nicholas Fisk, Grinny

‘You remember me . . .’ Whoosh. Those three words still send a little thrill of terror down my spine. I don’t think I’m the only adult for whom, when they look back on their childhood reading, the books that scared them are remembered with a particular intensity. Just as childhood nightmares stay with us, so do stories – some of them seeming quite innocent to adults – which wobbled some fragile pillar of childhood security.

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