Clay (26 page)
Authors: Melissa Harrison
Clay
would not have been written without the following people:
The brilliant Kathy Gale (www.kgpublishingservices.co.uk), who told me I was a writer, and that I was writing a book; my agent Jenny Hewson at Rogers, Coleridge & White, who took a chance on something unformed; Robert Macfarlane and Jon McGregor, for their encouragement at an early stage; Michael Fishwick, Anna Simpson, Anya Rosenberg, Oliver Holden-Rea and everyone else at Bloomsbury; my sister Joelle, upon whom I inflicted an early draft; Joanna and Tom Ridge and Margaret and Tony Young, to whose homes I decamped to write; also Diana and Jim Elliott of Shillings Cottage in Hemyock; Magda Pukaluk and Wies Tondryk for help with the Polish language; Simon Wenzel of Watford School for Boys, for advice on school matters; Roy Vickery for his survey of plants on Tooting Common, and Roger Golding for information on ferns; Bianca Neumann at Veolia and Dave Oram and David Everett of the Lambeth Parks Service; the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside; Mandy Barrow of Woodlands Junior School, Kent; John Enfield of the British Postmark Society. Despite all this help, any errors in this book are entirely my own.
Melissa Harrison is a freelance writer and photographer whose clients include the
Guardian
. She was the winner of the John Muir Trust’s ‘Wild Writing’ Award in 2010, and
Clay
is her debut novel. She lives in South London and writes about her local environment on her website, Tales of the City.
http://www.talesofthecity.co.uk/
Copyright © 2013 by Melissa Harrison
First published in Great Britain 2013
This electronic edition published in February 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Bloomsbury, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN: 978-1-62040-040-1