Georgina Morley

But there's always something slightly out of reach and slightly hard to find.

I first encountered Penelope

Fitzgerald at what she described as posh crammers in Artillery Row, Victoria, because she was my English teacher.

Amazing.

I can't tell a lie.

It was in the autumn of 1975 and I had been sent to the posh crammer, not because I'm particularly posh or was in need of cramming, but because my deeply fifth-rate boarding school had gone bankrupt the day before we went back in the upper sixths.

I think that's true.

The thing about her, you talk about the telly and she was, she was, you sat there in lessons with this person who was visibly distray and, you know, hair everywhere and mild, sort of very mild mannered, watery eyes, looking like she wasn't really concentrating, always with a series of carrier bags in which she carried your essays, all her stuff.

And yet she noticed everything.

And if you sort of said something moronic about Yates, which I did frequently back then, she would look at you beadily and you'd say, well, I think Yates is a da-da-da-da.

And she'd go, do you?

And you go, okay, maybe not.

And she made you think.

And I think that's also what she does in the novels.

And she hadn't been able to write the novels.

She had to keep the whole show on the road.

You know, Desmond was a hopeless drunk, unemployable.

And by that year, dying, though, we callow children knew nothing of this.

And keeping the family going and living in the Grimm Council flat, which is just up the road from where I now live.

And before that, on the boat.