Then, a far more leisurely working-over of the whole until you get it to say what you want it to say to the best of your ability. There’s a trap there, of course. It is possible to work on something too much, and all you end up doing is flattening, deadening the product—rather like over-kneading bread dough. It is equally possible to get carried away, adding bits and pieces here, there and everywhere, often just to show how clever you are. Experience has certainly taught this writer that, more often than not, it is better to take stuff out than put stuff in. Less means more. Well, sometimes…Maybe not always.

Possum Perkins is the story of Rosie and Michael: Rosa Dorothy Perkins—how fortuitous that her rose-loving mother had ended up with the appropriate surname—and Michael Geraghty. Sometimes I have thought that in Rosie and Michael I am exploring the two sides of my own character. I am both of them. The one an introspective loner; the other, gregarious, outgoing and sometimes thoughtless. One certainly brighter than the other.

I have learnt, through reading what others have written about my work, that I have an intuitive feel for the ‘shape’ of a story. I don’t know whether it is intuition or not. Probably it is more instinct. It is certainly something I have never thought much about. I do know that I have the ability to build a tale to a satisfactory climax. I know, also, that I generally aim towards a double climax, certainly in my novels of, say, 30,000-plus words.

In Possum Perkins, poor Rosie’s tale resolves in at least a part-resolution of matters with her sick, alcoholic mother, through to the assault upon her by her insanely jealous father. And then, to add to the poor girl’s load, the possibly inevitable death of Plum, the possum she has raised. When I think about it now, maybe I gave the poor soul too much to contend with.

Much has been written about Possum Perkins, most particularly in regard to the father–daughter relationship. Reg Perkins assuredly has a suffocating love for his daughter, his only child. She is, to this poor sad loner, the only ray of sunshine in his life. His wife has deserted him—if not physically, at least in almost every other sense as she lies in her drunken and drug-induced miasma. Indeed, this little family is full of loners, two of them very sad indeed. So devastation is somewhat inevitable when one of this tightknit trio reaches outside its confines, and an outsider reaches in!

There are those who have chosen to read incest into the work. So be it. Let’s face it, the old adage that to the pure all things are indecent holds more than a grain of truth! Suffocating, cloying and indeed unhealthy may sum up Reg Perkins’s relationship with his daughter. That he would die for his child is, I think, equally true, although not explored in the piece. Incest in its strict sense? I think not. For all that, it is this element that has bedevilled this work’s long life, almost to the present day.

I finished the work and sent it off to Paul Bradwell at Reed Methuen. I know that he and his consultant editor at the time, Dorothy Butler, gave the story great consideration, but ‘aspects’ of it worried them. While they pondered, I beavered away on my next book, My Summer of the Lions.