As we shimmy laden trays toward the far side of the outdoor seating area, Clare Sambrook indicates some iron railings that separate the cafe from the rest of Holland Park: 'That's where it happens,'� she says, 'that's where Daniel gets his head stuck.'�

She refers to an early passage in her debut novel, Hide and Seek, where nine-year-old narrator Harry Pickles recalls his little brother - 'fat, stupid and two'� - being rescued by Otis the fireman. Dan has managed to trap his head between some park railings, and having tried all the conventional remedies, including greasy cosmetics applied to the ears, his mother and aunt despair and call the emergency services. Soon a handsome black fireman is on the scene and doing the business: 'that moment I fell in love with Otis,'� Harry confides to the reader, 'Auntie Joan took a lot longer about it.'�

This recollection is especially poignant as the young narrator speaks from the other side of a terrible crisis that now renders such childhood accidents as clichés; things to be nostalgic about, like mumps, or scabby knees. On a poorly planned and badly executed school trip to Legoland, Harry's brother disappears, a catastrophe he feels profoundly responsible for. Hide and Seek is the story of how Harry's family disintegrates in the wake of this terrible loss, and how Harry struggles with his own demons, helped by his heroic uncle Otis, in order to learn to live again.

Sitting and drinking coffee on this early June morning, with children playing and mothers squawking in the background, it seems right to hold some of this darkness at bay for a moment and stay on the subject of Sambrook's choice of location for the book. Her rendition of a Notting Hill square, vivid with life from the perspective of a nine-year-old is so affecting that I find myself looking for telltale stress marks on the railings next to me.

'It partly came out of financial expediency,'� she explains. 'It was the first time in my life that I hadn't earned from working and it made me a bit frightened, so I decided to do it very quickly. I thought that one of the things that would cut the time down was if I just based it in the square where I lived, where all the settings are places I know really well. So it cut out an element of the research. I knew the locations already, and I could more easily imagine what went on there.'�

Such pragmatism is no doubt related to Sambrook's previous work in journalism. Having graduated from Cambridge, she started writing for the retailer John Lewis's Gazette, a glamorous whirl of 'interviewing people about new warehouse openings.'� She then worked on a marketing magazine with the Haymarket Group (owned by Michael Heseltine) before 'scrambling' her way onto the nationals:

'I ended up, bizarrely, as a financial reporter on the Telegraph, which would be the last place I would have expected to be. Then I went freelance to do more investigative work, then as a freelance I wrote all over the place: for The Guardian, Mail on Sunday, Private Eye, all over really.'�

Of course writing for newspapers and writing novels are two different enterprises, and Sambrook is clear on which elements of journalism have aided this first foray in to fiction:

'Some things really helped, like being able to do research. I wasn't nervous about ringing the fire brigade's union to ask for help, or phoning the police to ask about procedures. That comes out of journalism; just feeling that it's OK to ask.'�

This is not to say that the jump to novel-writing was plain sailing: 'The thing that I really thought would be a big disadvantage is that you have to be clear in journalism, you have to be clear in what your doing. Every story fits its format very tightly, and you have to give your readers what they expect. Of course all this is death to a novel. I had to really try hard not to signpost what I was doing all the time and I think I succeeded so well that you couldn't tell what the hell was going on in the book at first, and then I did a critique on that.'�

Hide and Seek resists simple classification. The bright tone and frequent use of nine-year-old-isms puts it somewhere near teenage fiction, yet this is at odds with the disturbing currents - scenes of marital breakdown, intimations of acute psychological instability - running just below the surface. 'I don't really draw a distinction between children's literature and adult's,'� states Sambrook, 'I wrote it with adults in mind, but aware that bright children of 12 or 13 might read it.'� What the book needs, she suggests, is a parental guidance label: 'When friends have asked whether it's suitable for their kids I've always told them to read it first and make their own decision.'�

This adoption of a 'middle space' between children's and adult fiction can therefore be seen as part of a wider creative strategy. The book is about a transitional period in Harry's life: the middle space between childhood into adolescence. I suggest to Sambrook that this transition operates right down to the level of language. Early on in the novel, Harry, Dan and their parents take a forty-five second walk to the church round the corner, and the world is described from a child's perspective: a fleeting blur of colours and details alighted on for a second and then forgotten:

In next door's garden Shy Geoffrey popped his head out from
behind the The Times to tell us something. Something nice, most
likely [...] Out in the square Mrs Gomez was throwing a wobbly [...]
'Nice dress, Mo,' said Sebastiano's mum as we strolled by. Then
she turned and bellowed at the bushes, 'You'll have it cold or not at all!

'It's like an eternal present,'� Sambrook muses, 'I think that's one of the differences between childhood and adulthood, children live in the present much more than adults do.'� She goes on to identify the loss of this type of perception with the onset of those mental states that tend to make us unhappy in adulthood: worry, nostalgia, even embarrassment: 'Children come to embarrassment very late, which is why they can behave as refreshingly badly as they do.'� As if on cue, a stentorian Notting Hill mum shouts over our heads, 'On the right hand side Benjamin, you're not listening

After Dan's disappearance, the immediacy of Harry's connection to the world starts to wane. He attends a school sports day and is approached by a friend holding a medal, but feels a 'wall of Kryptonite' between himself and his peers, a new self-consciousness. Sambrook points out that this is the first time Harry sees that life goes on: 'I think that's another thing that he learns, and which he's angry about; that the bottom has fallen through the world, but not for everybody. Around him everyone carries on as normal and that strikes him as bizarre. He expects to see earthquakes, chaos everywhere, because that's how it is at home.'�

It is Sambrook's ability to show Harry switching between these ways of perceiving which makes Hide and Seek the insightful read it is. For instance, when Harry is talking about his father turning from a hugely competent, trusted doctor to someone who finds hanging up socks difficult, one can see straight away that this is both a childlike observation and also - perhaps because it picks up something that lies beneath the adult emotional radar - a very percipient one.

'Because that's how pain manifests itself; at that level of detail. An adult wouldn't pick this up because they would be too busy asking 'how are you?' and expecting someone in that situation to talk.'�

This ties in to the other great observation in the book, the fact that adults lie to children. Not necessarily malicious lies, of course, but things like, 'there's nothing to worry about,'� which all children learn to see through in the end.

Sambrook agrees: 'Yes, that's when you know you should be worrying. It's like when Daniel gets his head trapped in the railings. Joan says 'this is a job for Danger Mouse'� and he starts screaming. He's fine up until that point, but as soon as he hears the adult reassurance he realises he's in danger.

It would be fairly easy, given the above, to draw the conclusion that Hide and Seek is really about nostalgia for the cosy certainties of childhood - having 'the best looking parents in the school car park,' or being able to believe things grown ups tell you - but Sambrook is wary of such an interpretation: 'I don't know if it's about nostalgia,'� she demurs, 'it is about Harry learning what loss is, not just somebody not being there any more. It's much more than that, about the way it affects his self-esteem. He becomes a clumsy footballer as a result of Dan's loss. He loses intellectual acumen. He grapples with these things: it's about Harry discovering what loss entails.'�

Footballing prowess and academic achievement are not the only things to suffer in the aftermath of Daniel's disappearance. As his mother and father grow more distant, from each other as well as from him, there is a pervading sense that Harry is attempting to negotiate some very difficult terrain with a broken moral compass. One of the most troubling strands of the novel's plot revolves around a character called Terry, a poor little rich kid who manipulates an emotionally needy Harry in order to secure his own place in the peer group. When Harry becomes obsessed with the idea that a local gardener is his brother's abductor, it is Terry who urges - under the pretext of 'comrades honour' - a knife into Harry's hand.

There's something uncannily reminiscent of Golding's Lord of the Flies in this relationship, something that Sambrook - despite her aforementioned attempts to avoid signposting - seems to be playing with in an early scene in which Harry's friends act out parts Golding's novel in a semi-ironic fashion. Did Sambrook intend Hide and Seek to be in any way a reworking of Golding's themes? She's not keen on the suggestion: 'I'd read Lord of the Flies, and I'd made a sort of - what's the pretentious word for it? 'homage'? - to Golding by giving the boys a conch shell, and having the kids in the square play Lord of the Flies. But I think I was just saying that I'd enjoyed that book. It's quite ironic really, Harry and Piggy all know the story and it's connotations but they don't realise how like it they are.'�

Sambrook pauses thoughtfully, and then kindly accommodates my line of thought: 'It's interesting what you say about Lord of the Flies because that book is about power as much as anything, and the jostling for position that had previously been very safe in its normal context with all the nannies and house masters on hand to make sure it didn't go to far, but not so here where nobody is in charge. I suppose part of the change for Harry is that the normal positionings, the premier league table he was on, have all changed. And Terry coming along as well is pretty disruptive, because he comes from a pretty dysfunctional home and is not a very well loved child and is the very last kind of friend that Harry needs at this point in his life.'�

What Harry needs, of course, is his uncle Otis. When Harry's prime role model, his father, goes to pieces, it is the big working class fireman that 'doesn't read books' who steps in to fill up the gap: 'I wanted Otis to be different from Harry's immediate family,'� Sambrook explains. ' He's different by virtue of his ethnic and cultural background. He's a very bright guy but he's not been to university like the other grownups in the story. I wanted to build it so that initially it is Otis who is being judged by Dom, the father, as not quite coming up to scratch, and then Dom retreats as a father figure and Otis takes over, in a generous way.'�

Otis may be Harry's main external influence, but Sambrook also uses a sophisticated device to show how Harry's internal struggle is progressing. Soon after Dan's disappearance, Harry begins a sporadic dialogue with his little brother's imaginary friend Biffo, a sort of surrogate superego who not only provides Harry with sage advice but also allows Sambrook to retain the the tone of the novel;

'I didn't want the reader to 'hear' Harry thinking,'� this would of course disrupt the novel's tendency to 'show' rather than 'tell.' 'At one point in the writing I had loads of long interior monologues from Harry. But, after some editorial assistance, I put in a few more signposts and took out thousands of words of interior monologue. Then I just left it to Biffo.'�

In fact it's difficult to overemphasise the complexity of what's going on here. Biffo is at one and the same time part of Harry and something Harry identifies as being outside himself. He articulate some of Harry's thoughts, often urging caution in situations where Harry is unsure as to the right course of action. When Terry suggests that Harry should burn down the gardner's shed in revenge Harry's blood begins to boil. The deed is dangerously close as Harry experiences a moment where 'real life and games swirled about and bashed against each other.' Only Biffo's cool, reassuring drawl seems to give Harry some clarity: 'Hold arn here kiddo ... seems to me you should go easy, this guy has ishoos.'� For the first time it dawns on Harry he is n ot the only screwed up kid in the world.

As Sambrook sees it, Biffo's is 'partly an articulation of Harry's thoughts and partly a conjuring exercise. He's somebody that Daniel knew, and even if he's imaginary he provides Harry with some connection.

'What Biffo does, and what Harry would be doing inside his head, is providing the guidance, help and wisdom that isn't coming from his parents any more. But because Harry is a well loved child, and well looked after up until now, he's capable of almost being a ventriloquist for what his parents might have said if they weren't so totally devastated.'�

This is perhaps the central insight of Sambrook's novel: that whilst life isn't life without these terrible personal crises, and that people do change, there is at least some hope in the fact that if an individual has been well looked-after, well loved, then their good side will prevail.

'Hopefully it's not a depressing read,'� says Sambrook. 'And hopefully what makes it something that people come away from feeling that they've had a cathartic experience is that what the characters such as Harry and Otis manage to do, they manage to do because they've been well loved. They've got those strengths, they've taken this awful knock and by the end of the book they may not be recovering, but they're just starting to learn to grieve.'� Sambrook admits that this might sound a bit Miriam Stoppardish, but remains adamant: 'Grieving well is going to be their route out. I don't believe that Harry's parents will ever recover, and that's why I focused on Harry: because he's got time.'� Sambrook, evidently, does not subscribe to the view that children are resilient and can just 'bounce back': 'but one thing I think children do have in their favour is time. Time to grow out of the difficulty.'�

As we draw to the end of our conversation, I note that the London sky has been following the flow of our talk as though its pathetic fallacy switch has been turned the wrong way. Having been sunny for the last half hour, dark clouds have now hove into view, threatening an imminent and biblical deluge. Spirits remain buoyant, however, as we carry our empty cups and saucers back to the tea shop and head for the exit. I suddenly remember that Sambrook has just returned from the Hay festival where she has been promoting her novel. She speaks of the experience - one which has been known to strike fear into the heart of even well-established authors - in terms both self-deprecating and at the same time oddly self-assured:

'Yes, I was up on stage in Hay,'� she confirms. 'A gig? Is that what it's called?'� She laughs at her own assumed pretension, before becoming suddenly earnest: 'Actually, the performance thing has just been a surprise and a delight to me. I've always thought of myself as quite socially awkward, but I don't feel nearly as awkward when I'm on the stage.'� A good discovery certainly, and one hopes she will get to put it to more good use in the future. Again that mix of self-deprecating, self-assurance: 'I really enjoyed it and got lots of response,'� she says, 'and people laughed when they were meant to.'�


- Hide & Seek by Clare Sambrook is published by Canongate.

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