Hilda Hinton

But every now and then you hear from her and it's basically to say what a bad mother she is.

You know, she says things like, I always get it wrong, don't I?

You know, I'm a bad mother.

And as she sort of shrinks and becomes more shriveled over, I think she says something like, mum bent over as time passes.

Sadness ends up in your spine.

So she sort of falls apart in a different way to everybody else.

The father stops touching them, stops engaging with them a little bit and the kids are always watching him outside the window because they're worried he's just not going to come back.

The big brother starts banging his head on the headboard and I think Dad puts some bubble wrap on it and then she can hear all the popping of the bubble wrap every time he's banging his head.

And her response is to stop taking her coat off

It gets more and more filthy as time goes on and a growing collection of things in her pockets.

And, oh, it's, yeah, it's a terrific sort of exploration of everybody falling apart, even though they're together, they're all falling apart individually.

Yeah, yeah, it could have.

Yeah, the themes are similar, although the books couldn't be further apart in some ways.

Yeah, there's definitely a growing pile of unsaid things and the isolation of the protagonist is profound.

She's got a little sister who she sees as light and she sees herself and her surviving brother as dark and the big brother starts sort of killing animals really and she becomes complicit in this sort of behaviour.

But she acknowledges her darkness and...

can't really contain the way she's acting out.

It is.

And I think the cows are represented, you know, they sort of go downhill in the same way the family does.

At some point, foot and mouth disease kicks in.