David Barker

PB married zoology lecturer David Barker of Durham University, with whom she had already been living for close to a decade.

PB met David Barker , a university scientist twenty years her senior, in a pub in 1969. He left his wife to live with her, and both of their children were born before his divorce...

PB says that one stage she threw away the manuscript of this novel in despair, but her husband rescued it from the bin. She said she felt the absence of models for writing fiction...