Alan Garner is sitting in a high-backed leather porter’s chair right inside the hearth enclosure of an immense fireplace, with a chimney stack stretching up 27ft and a very strange-looking firepit.
I duck under a beam to join him. He adds a log to the fire and says: ‘This firepit is made from a disused steam engine we found in an old lead mine and the rear brake-drum of a Model T Ford lorry.’ The flames give a crackling warmth and smoke swirls up the vast chimney, down which whooshes, periodically, the thunder of a passing train. I recognise this as the sound of ‘Noony’ from Garner’s most recent novel, Treacle Walker. I perch on a low beam and Garner tells me that this is where his protagonist Joe Coppock sits. ‘The chimney wrote Treacle Walker, I didn’t,’ says Garner.
‘The first-generation academic has an adolescence of isolation because to the family the child becomes a pariah’
When Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Garner became the oldest author ever to make the list.
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