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'It began with the memory of a playground game': Philip Hensher on writing The Northern Clemency

In my experience, the starting points of novels lie years, often decades, before the moment when they start to coagulate into words on a page. For The Northern Clemency it was the memory, both exact and tantalisingly too complex for reconstruction, of a playground game.

It must have been in the winter of 1974-75, some sort of chasing game that seized the imagination of a small group, then a large group, then half a school, then disappeared. What were the rules? Only the memory of that passion had stuck, and a sense of people who were included and those who were excluded. It was the sort of thing a novel could investigate.

My new novel was written from the spaces of feeling, memory and speculation that The Northern Clemency cleared for me

Some time around 2004, my life changed a little. There had been a very serious illness, a close brush with death, in my immediate family. I had met the man who I had started to think would be there for the rest of my life. I started to have the sense that there was a stretch of life behind me, now.

My 40th birthday was in 2005, and I had a terrific party, including 40 tracks in chronological order, one a year. You could watch different generations getting up to dance at different irresistible stretches. Time was passing, and that was something the novel could investigate, too.

I made a practice of getting up early, and thinking hard about long-lost places – a school, our house then, a favourite shop, a library. All sorts of details would emerge, even phantom smells. Then I started to write. I knew who the characters were, but not at first who they grew into. That often came with a sort of click in the mind, like the one that realises that (of course) the friend you’ve had for years is the youngest of five brothers. The small humourless boy with a passion for the facts about snakes – he would want to live by unreal principles.

Philip Hensher.
Philip Hensher. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Those lives could surprise me, and I quickly realised that I couldn’t write a detailed plot far in advance without constraining their freedom. I put two flirtatious teenagers in a room together on a hot day in June – I had envisaged a toxic affair – and found to my astonishment that, once they were given the opportunity, they just weren’t interested in each other.

It took about three years to write. I wrote best when I was away from the novel’s sites. The most productive period was three weeks in Khartoum, Sudan, where my boyfriend – now my husband – was working. There was not a great deal to do in that great but strange city, with the two Niles meeting as if with a dull, massive thud. In the afternoons, Mr Santolini came round to teach me Arabic. But in the mornings I got out one of the 10 school exercise books and one of the 20 blue Biros I had bought from a stationer in the Omdurman market, and wrote solidly, 2,000 or even 3,000 words.

The whole experience was a liberating one. I felt afterwards that the act of writing hadn’t drained my reservoirs of knowledge, experience and feeling; it had filled it. Writing my new novel, A Small Revolution in Germany was a very different experience. But it was written from the spaces of feeling, memory and speculation that The Northern Clemency cleared for me.

• A Small Revolution in Germany is published by 4th Estate.