it is, and that - it’s not a comfort because there isn’t one, but it gives you a dignity.’


That is why, she adds, the Victorian mourning system worked, because it meant people knew how to react. ‘I’m wearing black for a year and a day because my heart is broken and that’s obvious. But mind you, if you were going out to a country house you had to take your mourning with you just in case somebody died. Somehow you had to know if it was full mourning or half. And you had to appear at breakfast in your correct mourning - it was awful. That was your luggage. Like a newsreader.’


Death is weird and frightening, but there’s nothing you can do about it.


‘Death is weird and frightening, but there’s nothing you can do about it,’ she finishes. And with that glint in her eye, she adds: ‘Imagine if I put that on the cover – it would be so lovely.’


She was amazed by the way that the children would react; in particular, to a singer character she made up called Nancy Minceover; her niece would invent songs for her, and ‘completely walked away with the character and made it something, which I thought was brilliant. … Yes, we had toys going to an imaginary place. I’m sure lots of people do this. When you can’t see them, when you’re at school … and the answer is that they’re having a gay old time, and you tell stories about them.’


There is a great sadness at the heart of Saunders’ book, which is also touched on Five Children on the Western Front, and that is the death of her only son, Felix, at the age of 19. The new book confronts that grief directly: ‘I cried writing it, and in the end, I hadn’t been brave enough in the first draft and my editor pointed out the bits that weren’t working and I realised, without my having to say very much, she was right about the bits that weren’t working because I’d stopped being completely truthful.’


She continues: ‘Children don’t get enough chance to express something that we, grown-ups, don’t like talking about; and we don’t like talking about death, and we don’t like talking about the death


Children don’t get enough chance to express something that we, grown-ups, don’t like talking about; and we don’t like talking about death


of children. So it does make you a freak if your child’s died, and it makes people scared of you, because they have no experience.’


The writer Julian Barnes, with whom Saunders has a long-standing friendship, passed on something he was given when [his wife] Pat died: ‘that nature is exact in the matter. It hurts exactly as much as it’s worth, and if it wasn’t worth anything then it wouldn’t hurt, and that was helpful because it dignifies what you’re going through. Yes, this is important, it’s worth everything, I’m grieving for my son, and it’s worth everything in the whole f**king world, that’s how important


Philip Womack is an author and critic. His books include The Double Axe and the Darkening Path trilogy. He is crowdfunding his new novel The Arrow of Apollo, with Unbound.


The Land of Neverendings is published by Faber & Faber, 978-0-5713-1084-5, £10.99 hbk Five Children on the Western Front, Faber & Faber, 978-0-5713-2318-0, £6.99 pbk


Books for Keeps No.227 November 2017 9


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