SOURCE: "Potterland," in The Dalhousie Review, Vol. 68, No. 4, Winter, 1988–89, pp. 511-21.

[In the following essay, Delany reviews several of Potter's works, including Pennies from Heaven, The Singing Detective, Christabel, and the two novels Ticket to Ride and Blackeyes.]

I was born into a coalminer's cottage in a stony village in what was then a relatively isolated Forest of Dean that heaves up in half-hidden layers of grey and green between two rivers on the assertively English side of the border with Wales. Brass bands, rugby football, nonconformist chapels with names like Zion and Salem, the sound of silicotic old men from the now closed mines spitting the dust out of their rattling chests. Secret places. Unknown caves. A mother who was a Londoner, bringing occasional uncles with outlandish Fulham or Hammersmith tongue, who did not say 'thee' and 'thou.' And when the teacher at the junior school...