The novelist herself was born on 8 May 1943 in Thornaby-on-Tees, England, to a mother whom she declines to identify. Her father was absent; identified as a Royal Air Force (RAF) officer in at least one interview, he was said to have been killed in the war, but Barker later came to believe "they didn't marry and he just buggered off." She learned even later that her mother did not know who her father was. When Pat was seven years old, her mother, Moira, did marry; but Pat was raised by her grandmother and grandfather. Her grandfather was a veteran of World War I, and she was fascinated by his bayonet wound--he used to permit her to insert her finger into it--and both the bayonet wound and the war itself have come to loom large in her fiction. Her grandmother worked in a fish and chip shop; her grandfather was a laborer, whom she remembers seeing wash himself at the kitchen sink. Her grandmother's first husband had been a spiritualist minister, and some of his books, in addition to an encyclopedia, made up the reading matter of her childhood home.
Pat Barker was educated at grammar school (that is, a state-funded selective secondary school), in a girls-only institution that was "so strict that no girl was allowed to talk to a boy even if he was her brother" and then went to London, where she earned a B.Sc.
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