The Sounds of Silence

I can't lie that DANNY was a difficult book to write. Although when I look back through my Progress Logs it certainly seemed painful enough at the time. It was an easy thing to do, rather like vomiting onto the page. There's a scene a third of the way through Volume 1 when Danny says that " He was spewing up lies. All the lies that had been stuck in his throat for almost fifteen years." Well, that was the experience of writing to me. Everything I felt was in my book. Everything I felt about the lies people tell, the lies they are told. I offloaded all my negative emotions into a huge work of prose.

A giant cathartic dump then?

Yes, but there was more to it than that. I wanted to show people that life is never black and white, that wrong is sometimes right, and that some of our popular ideas of right are often very wrong.

Take "Honour thy father and mother" for instance, a much-respected and oft-quoted maxim which should prompt two immediate provisos: Only if they're worth honouring and know how to honour you.

Many children have found to their lasting cost, and sometimes to their ultimate cost, that honouring their parents is not nearly as smart as running away from them.

It's an odd notion that becoming a parent somehow gives people emotional depth. If they never had any before why should the combination of sperm and egg make it appear? Is parenthood a hormone, a dormant vital organ, a form of primeval programming? Sadly, no. Vindictive bullies remain vindictive bullies. Parenthood simply turns them into megalomaniacs with the biological authority to indulge themselves in any way they choose.

When the first, much truncated, edition of DANNY was produced in 1998 my brother was more upset by it than my mother was. He couldn't understand how I could write "a book like that". Unfortunately I never found out quite what he meant by 'like that'. Was it the sex? The nature of the sex? Or all those ugly family secrets being hung out to dry?

The nasty secrets of the Jackson Moores are not my secrets. But they are the same in principle. They fester and corrupt and infect. Everybody. No matter how innocent they are of them. They turn everyone who knows them into liars and everyone who doesn't into victims. There is never a good reason for keeping a secret, at fifteen or fifty. Like any bad karma it will get you in the end. Unfortunately like a sniper on a tower it usually gets a whole lot of innocent bystanders too.

I was brought up to believe in the sanctity of secrets, in the reverential silence in which they flourished. It was almost a family religion. I had an endless list of things I had to be silent about. My father's innate inability to grasp the concept of equality, a failing all the more alarming in a lifelong communist. He found no irony in asserting his absolute authority over us while lecturing us on the powerless indignity of Russian serfdom and the evils of the self-serving system that maintained it.

I was silenced in any discussions concerning my future. My role was simply to achieve and somehow, without knowing exactly how, fulfil my parents thwarted ambitions. I was silenced while witnessing the constant bullying I saw around me; an entire subculture of uncles and grandfathers who treated their wives and children like chattel and whose idea of a family discussion was to rage and roar, and if that didn't work to beat their opponents into silence.

I was mute about the sexual abuse that went on in my family to such an extent that it rendered it completely invisible. The emperor's new clothes in reverse. No relative ever mentioned it to me, except for a cousin who experienced it first hand, and even she never actually named the perpetrator, although we both knew who it was, and had known from an age so young it merits as a form of abuse in itself.

I can remember crying myself to sleep with the weight of my silences. Even my fear of the dentist became a silence.

Floundering to understand I came to the conclusion that my silence must be serving someone , since it certainly wasn't serving me, and realised that the true benefit of children's silence was in allowing adults to get on with the fantasy facades of their lives unencumbered by any guilt or distress. If your child cannot tell you about its pain you don't need to examine your own. Ipso facto, a happy and untroubled life.

It still surprises me when readers say how much they dislike John, or say they like Danny "even although he's not very nice." I have nothing but admiration for all my characters, mad and damaged as they may be. They not only survive their appalling lives but they refuse to be silenced. No matter how much everyone around them hates them for it, they get up there and tear down the walls, pushing their ugly lives in the faces of those who would rather not know.

They are warriors in the battle against silence, and I love them for it.