It’s hard to get a perspective on a bit of fiction as rich, but also as over the top as The End of the Morning. It is full of the hyped-up colour of literalism and the barked Derbyshire dicta come across as the coloured pictures of a half-recollected, half-fabricated world. We hear that instead of reading children’s books, the children read Tristram Shandy and Rabelais and Don Quixote.

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There is a parallel essay later in the book that gives a bit of perspective to this. Again we’re told that the father made his own Rosinante – the Don’s decrepit horse – out of a bit of found wood that testified to his lack of aesthetic sense. In The End of the Morning, the children – though not Cressida – are punished for gleaning the facts of life and proclaiming them on the basis of all the dirty words in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. In the essay – not Clift’s best – she says, urbanely and smoothly, that she knew the dirty words anyway, but of course, the newspaper could never print them.

The End of the Morning is a weird, half-compelling, half-alienating bit of fiction about the strangeness of the strategies brought to bear on the half-real, half-nightmarish demons a rich and mad childhood bequeathed to Clift. Wheatley glosses it with reference to the fact that Clift had a baby in her youth, which was adopted out. This apparently formed a trauma for her, not least in terms of telling her children.

The publication is the fine fruit of Wheatley’s obsession with Clift and leaves us in her debt. How strange, though, that this should issue from the writer of such sublimely self-possessed newspaper pieces. Some of those reproduced here have been anthologised but none in the 2022 collection. Every so often, they lurch and lapse but the consistent best of them are magic.