In an interview on Childhood Innocence

Tell me about that book

The Go-Between is about a child, Leo Colston, who goes to stay with a family. He ends up being used by adults to run errands: he’s taking letters between a couple, Marianne and Ted, who are having an illicit affair, and he doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s just so innocent, and then he experiences the sheer shock of suddenly realising what’s been going on and the huge amount of adult recrimination that comes with it.

The big difference between these two books is that The Go Between has an adult perspective.

Yes. In A History of Insects it’s contemporaneous and in The Go-Between he’s looking back. But, although Leo Colston is relating it in retrospect, he’s also relating it as he saw it at the time. So yes, he’s got the knowledge now to understand what it was he was doing but he does take us into a world, and a very innocent world, at the end of the last century, where the children are quite benignly ignored. I think we all forget that air of bafflement from childhood: we remember loads of things about childhood – we all remember innocence. I think what we tend to forget is bafflement.

Do you think the charm of The Go-Between is in its bafflement or in its innocence?

I think it’s a mixture of both; I mean, bafflement is innocence: that state in which you simply haven’t a clue, and, of course, once it’s lost it’s lost for ever. Once you’ve understood what the real world is about, and what is going on in adult life, and that grownups aren’t gods, they’re actually human beings with the normal quota of faults and foibles … once you’ve got to that stage you can never ever go back. You could go back and play childish games or go back to childish pursuits, but you can never return to the state of innocence. I think that quite a few authors look back on that with nostalgia whether they realise it or not, almost wishing they could recreate innocence. I think L P Hartley never produced anything like as good as The Go-Between again.