Dexter Petley - Editor

Soon after Dexter Petley began writing down his observations of people on the borders of rural Kent and Sussex during the 1960s and 1970s, he realised that his stories were acquiring a broader significance. Between the riverbank where he taught himself to fish and the secondary modern where gardening and smallholding were on the curriculum, he witnessed the lives of a demobbed generation who were still adjusting to post-war Britain, surviving hand-to-mouth, eking out a living mending cars, recycling scrap metal or hop-picking. This fractured landscape, carried like an heirloom since boyhood, has allowed Petley to untangle the fragments of his own life, from the loss of his first love to the nomadic existence he has been living ever since, in London, Africa and France. Here is an unsentimental memoir of exceptional quality. Reminiscent of Laurie Lee and H.E. Bates, each story is peopled by vivid, earthy characters who gravitate around the lakes and ponds and rivers that have flowed through Dexter Petley’s life.

We are living in the anthropocene – an epoch where everything is being determined by the activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian species. How best to make our way through the ruins that we have made?

This anthology of commissioned work tries to answer this as it explores new and enduring cultural landscapes, in a celebration of local distinctiveness that includes new work from some of our finest writers. We have memories of childhood homes from Adam Thorpe, Marina Warner and Sean O’Brien; we journey with John Burnside to the Arizona desert, with Hugh Brody to the Canadian Arctic; going from Tessa Hadley’s hymn to her London garden to caving in the Mendips with Sean Borodale to shell-collecting on a Suffolk beach with Julia Blackburn.

Helen Macdonald, in her remarkable piece on growing up in a 50-acre walled estate, reflects on our failed stewardship of the planet: ‘I take stock.’ she says, ‘During this sixth extinction, we who may not have time to do anything else must write now what we can, to take stock.’ This is an important, necessary book.

Little Nineveh

About the author: Dexter Petley lives in Burgundy where he divides his time between writing, fishing and growing organic vegetables. His first novel, Little Nineveh, was published in 1995, his second, Joyride, in 1999 and his third, White Lies, in 2003.

The extraordinary memoir of growing up poor on the Kent-Sussex border in the 1960s and 70s. Peopled with vivid and earthy characters, this is an autobiography to be compared to Laurie Lee and H. E. Bates.

They still called him Pisspot, the local scrubbers and all his ex-classmates, as they whizzed around the village on their Motobecanes. They didn’t understand why he wasn’t hanging about up the chip shop with them any more, or phlobbing cheese and onion curd outside the public bar of The Royal Oak and playing inside left for the second team. But it was 1973 and Henry Chambers, aged 17, was motivated to achieve greatness. He’d just found out that if he wanted to be a poet he had to have both a vision of himself and a Pre-Raphaelite girlfriend. But that was impossible in the dead winter village of Hawkhurst. And the Claires and Virginias of West Kent College, Tunbridge Wells already had the Jameses and Jollyons as their social equals. Not Henry, the quiet poet with the tumbleweed bumfluff and cotted hair. No: for Henry, the future was bleak. There was no point and no vision. But just as Henry was putting the black edges round his own stationery and plotting to murder his baggots, he visited an `old lady’ on his Thursday afternoon community service. The house was called Plato Villa and Maxine Pollenfex – not exactly the old lady he was expecting – was going to change Henry’s life, and everyone else’s, forever. Dexter Petley’s fourth novel is a searing infra-red vision of 1970s Britain and the tragedies of class and tradition. Written in typically blistering language, One True Void tells how seventeen year-old Henry Chambers turns bleakness into beauty, anarchy and hysteria into poetic redemption, and takes apart the whole life of a small Kent village as he goes.