Book of a lifetime: So long, Hector Bebb by Ron Berry

From The Independent archive: Niall Griffiths on a seismic childhood revelation that his familiar language was not a lesser one

I remembered Hector, a beast in the hills, killing and eating sheep among the slag heaps of a culture forced into desuetude (Getty)

Ron Berry’s fifth novel, first published in 1970, has been, and continues to be, a guide and pilot to my genesis and evolution as a writer. Other books share this badge, of course – Moby-Dick, The Return of the Native, Last Exit to Brooklyn – but “Bebb” came first, at age nine or thereabouts, and stunned me with recognition and a wondrous awe at the possibilities in words.

As a reader, I flailed and floundered when a child; the Rothmans Football Yearbook was a staple, as was the I-Spy Guide to the Hedgerow, which told me everything I needed to know about the daddy-long-legs except why. Everything I was given to read in school was told in a language unfamiliar and alien; this wasn’t how people spoke on the estate where I lived. This wasn’t the language I knew. I was vaguely aware that it should be seen as the correct and proper tongue, and one to which I should aspire, but it stayed bizarre and unbelievable to me.

What first drew me to the book, in the box at the jumble sale, I still don’t know, but it was a wild revelation to read. Its vernacular did not precisely match that which I was hearing around me, but that was irrelevant. I realised, for the first time, that the ways in which ordinary, non-TV people spoke – their rhythms and elisions, their slang, their ungrammatical but identifying linguistic tics – was important, and valuable, and uniquely expressive, and possessed of a huge communicative power. Ordinary people could be the subjects of books; they mattered. Their lives were worthy of exploring in literature. This was seismic.