Angela Carter makes it four Blue Plaques in one Clapham street ....but are they all what they seem?

Breaking months of silence to report a nugget of old news from this blighted corner of the blighted city. English Heritage has at last slapped one of their Blue Plaques on the house where the writer Angela Carter lived for the final 16 years of her life, at 107 The Chase, Clapham.

Those plastic-looking venetian blinds were certainly not there
when Angela Carter owned this house in Clapham. So
far as I remember most of the house of was painted deep
blood red.

This was reported in the Guardian on 11 September, but not in many other papers. I wonder who turned up to do the honours - and whether the plaque was covered with those rather camp little curtains on a drawstring, as happened at the unveiling of Natsume Soseki's plaque a decade ago, a few houses up in the same street.

I'm not sure where Angela Carter's work now stands in the literary world, but I do know that she meant a great deal to me. To anyone who had been turned on to the subversive delights of 'alternative' fiction and poetry in the late '60s, largely thanks to Penguin Books, Carter's fiery works were irresistible.

I read one of her early novels, The Magic Toyshop, on the top deck of the 68 bus, all the way from South Croydon Bus Garage to exotic Chalk Farm and what seemed the impossibly sophisticated world of NW3 hippie-dom.

En route the bus rumbled up and down the roller-coaster hills of south London - Beaulieu Hill, West Norwood, Tulse Hill,  Herne Hill and Camberwell. There was a specific corner on Norwood Road, SE24, opposite Brockwell park, which in the early November dusk seemed to me the perfect location of this story.

That area grew in imagination: I would dream about cycling to this Magic Toyshop. In my dream,  there was always a magic second-hand bookshop next door which also sold the best flapjack. And Brocks fireworks.

When, 25 years later I moved into a rickety 3rd floor flat in Clapham, I had no idea the author of that book lived in the same postal district.

Now I turn to her journalism more than her fiction. There's a great collection of her non-fiction writing called Shaking A Leg, which includes an article "D'you mean South?," written for New Society magazine in 1977. It's about South London in general and Clapham in particular, and says more about gentrification than anything else I have read. Although the process we see now is so much more aggressive,  more arrogant and selfish, it is essentially the same. And yet she clearly still loved living where she did live.

All this was the subject of an earlier post on this blog, written when the house where Natsume Soseki lodged for the last few months of his unhappy but productive stay in London got its plaque. Carter must have known Soseki lived a few houses up the street, but I don't think she ever references him.

For along time there was a tiny but fascinating Soseki Museum in a flat directly opposite this house. Sadly it closed, and the flat it occupied was sold, two years ago. I wrote about it here.

Nor (so far as I know) does Angela Carter ever mention Dorothy Dene, the artist's model and actress who lived for a while at 103 The Chase. Two doors and a hundred years apart: Dorothy Dene was for some years muse-in-chief to the Victorian painter, Frederic Lord Leighton (whose fancifully Arabesque house in Kensington is much as he left it, there for the visiting).

Notice the same brickwork and the same property-developer-approved grey
blinds two houses along from Angela Carter. I think Dorothy and her
employer/admired Lord Leighton would have favoured velvet curtains.

She stayed in Clapham for part of the 1880s, before Leighton helped her move to an altogether more respectable address in Kensington, from which she could more readily launch herself into the West End theatrical world.

There's a Blue Plaque on Dorothy Dene's  house as well - that's three in a row for this side of The Chase. It's only a Clapham Heritage platter, and not the full English Heritage monty. But, it looks the same. And there's an interesting essay on her life on the Clapham Society website.

There's a fourth, rather less convincing blue plaque in this now quite repulsively wealthy street, with its electric gates and Fort Knox front doors; of brickwork sand-blasted to a smooth blandness; plus paved-over front gardens to provide squatting space for an obese Range Rover or two.

This rather dubious memorial is at the southern end of The Chase, where it meets Clapham Common. On the side wall of a house there's one Blue roundel and two brown oblong plaques. They all commemorate street parties held to mark recent royal events - weddings etc. None of them is official: they do not even have the authority of a local history society.

All well and good, if you must show off your adoration of the family Windsor. Almost everyone who visits here comments on these plaques. The basic thing they ask is, how come you are you living in a street of monarchists? Who put those plaques there, and why?

They are mentioned by film-maker and author Adam Scovell in an excellent article on his blog Celluloid Wickerman,  "Wanders: Angel Carter's House". This was written a couple of years before the plaque arrived. His disappointment builds as he approaches his destination via the South Circular and a Clapham Common infested with people keeping fit in lycra. Seeing these bogus plaques at the end of Carter's street is another blow to his mental image of Carter's mythical south London habitat:

"It was a realisation that the road had changed, that it was now the antithesis of any of Carter’s visions in its gaudy celebration of monarchy. Walking on, the cars became expensive and the houses either empty or rammed with envy-inducing rooms of books."

I am afraid he would find even more expensive cars but fewer rooms crammed with books, in this street in October 2019.

It's embarrassing. I just wish someone had had a street party for Castro or Che or Karl Marx (or even  Groucho). Then maybe we could have a Red Plaque. Surely Lambeth council - once famously Red itself - would allow the balance?

Maybe Angela Carter, who looked forward to seeing a "Red Dawn over Clapham" - but sadly never did – might have agreed on this one.

Iain Sinclair hits SW8: the literary equivalent of a papal visit, in my book

Wandsworth Road Overground station: this where I and other  Clapham bumpkins can jump on a train to get to places such as Shoreditch where I can gawp at beautiful young hipsters. But it used to be an even more useful station.

So as promised I get my hands on Iain Sinclair's new book,  London Overground: A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line,  and immediately commit the unspeakable crime of jumping straight to the bits about my home turf - the stretch of this more orange than ginger line between Denmark Hill and Clapham Junction.

Oh my god, he's walking through Will Self's manor, but by god he does it with style.

I think I did  Sinclair a disservice in the previous entry. His chapter on Angela Carter is superb, unusually warm for  him ( but perhaps he is softening in his late middle age?) and also fairly uncomplicated.

He relates various encounters with the writer over several decades - from earliest meetings when, as a secondhand book-dealer and aspiring writer, he went to her house to buy a load of surplus signed first editions left over from book signings.

Then there was the time of her high-profile review of his novel Downriver in the London Review of Books, in which - if I remember it rightly - she confesses to finding the East End quite alien and scary, what with its bustling streets and wide pavements.

And so on through the decades to the publishing and literary prize parties of her later career, right up to her death in 1992.

This new orbital route through London's inner suburbs - a zone 2 railway version of the M25 - is also a sort of literary merrygoround. Sinclair uses it to link Angela Carter to J G Ballard and his dystopian novels of the near future, set in places like Chelsea Harbour (Imperial Wharf station); thence to Michael Moorcock (the bard of W11, author of Mother London, etc, who nevertheless grew up in Norbury) and Muriel Spark (Peckham Rye, Ballad of…), all as he says strewn along the Overgound line like carelessly scattered pearls.

He speculates on how the line might have affected Carter's work, had she lived.  It seems odd to me that the Overground actually leapfrogs over the heartland of her fiction, which I always imagine to be a mix of Camberwell, Herne Hill, Brixton and Lavender Hill.

It's not just me, is i,t who find it odd that the trains do not stop in Brixton? But maybe this is in reality a mercy for Brixton, maybe it will be spared the blandification that this Ginger Line appears to be bringing to some of the neighbourhoods it serves. A visit to a metal-bashing garage under the arches of Loughborough Junction last week made me think all is not lost in this area, and that there's still some space for dread beat and blood style living in SW9; the world of the Magic Toyshop is not completely dead, nor completely swept to the outermost suburbs.

 But that's just sentimental, dear: look what they're planning for the nearby estate.

But, back to Carter. I often saw her, and literally bumped into her in the local Arundel Newsagents several times. I always wanted to say something to my literary heroine but never had the nerve. She sometimes smiled, though.

So, swiftly,  back to the case in hand. I can't help wondering, as he and his companion strode along from Wandsworth Road station to The Chase, if Sinclair's literary divining rod dipped at any point as it picked up, then lost, the faint traces of  CAR Hills, the recently re-incarcerated writer of short fiction, reviews and other journalism,  perhaps best known for his Clapham Omnibus column in Prospect magazine, back in the early 2000s.

Known to many locals as "Prince Charles of the Wandsworth Road", Hills would trudge up and down this drag many times a day, often heading for free lunches at various church halls, or off to one or other of his grim, short-lived employments. Or, on a Monday evening, on his way to my flat for white wine, Bombay mix and Marlene Dietrich records.

Had he lived in Hackney, I've no doubt he'd have ended up as a vaguely sinister character in one of Sinclair's works.

But that's a different entry: I must get back to this wretched Overground. Sinclair bemoans the loss of the old Dalston Juntion to Broad Street commuter line. Here we have a similar  grudge to bear. When CAR Hills lived here, what is now the Clapham to Peckham stretch of the Overgorund was part of the the delightfully underused Victoria to London bridge loop, a splendid alternative to the heaving Northern Line which hardly anyone seems to know about. Those little two-carriage trains got me to work in Wapping in relative comfort, the final walk over Tower Bridge capping the pleasant journey.

OK, so now I can get to the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Brick Lane in double-quick time. And yes I am that Clapham bumpkin he mentions. We feel all the more like a wrong-side-of-tracks community these days. Rather than enjoying South London for what it is, the newcomers are trying very hard to turn their bits into honorary North London outposts. It has already happened to much of Battersea and Clapham, Vauxhall, Southwark and Bermondsey, Elephant and Peckham are following on very fast.

You'd never know, would you, that this house
 has  an interior straight out of the 1001
Nights….575 Wandsworth Road, now
 a National Trust property

Old Vauxhall and parts of Stockwell now exist virtually under the  shadow of the new wall of the Nine Elms Lane apartment blocks.

I like to imagine Sinclair and his mate glancing at the twin towers of Wandsworth Road, and wonder if they sensed the heavy, looming horrors of that massive property development just over the tracks. Poor, emasculated Battersea Power Station, its power removed, awaiting its new lightweight safe chimneys. As for the new 'affordable' housing and the promised linear park, well, I've not ever seen more oppressive architecture, not even in the suburbs of St Petersburg.

Sinclair and his companion will also have walked past 575 Wandsworth Road, the extraordinarily but I don't think there's a mention of this or its eccentric, multitalented owner. The house is now owned by the National Trust, open to visitors on a strictly limited basis.
decorated former home of the late poet, philosopher and civil servant, Khadambi Asalache (1935-2006),

But there's a mention of a Wandsworth Road junk shop where Sinclair's friend bought a "Bruce Chatwin draught excluder", something I can not even begin to visualise. (Shit, he means a book!)

But I do wonder if they went into my friend's shop (more of a vintage clothes and records shop than junk, or at least that's what I like to think), Eclectica; of course there are several other "junk shops" along this road.

I'm also excited that he gives an honourable mention to Russells, the British motorcycle spares shop in Falcon Road, which always makes me think of leather jackets, goggles, Up The Junction, early 1960s bikers racing over Chelsea Bridge on their BSA Gold Stars and Norton Featherbeds, their Triumph Bonnevilles and Matchless whatevers.

It's a beautiful survivor, and as Sinclair says there's an echo of Antonioni here - but it's a second echo, I am remembering a scene of Blow Up where he's driving through Brixton on his way to the park in his open Rolls, and he passes a long parade of shops, all painted red from top to toe.

And I know those shops, it's the Stockwell Road, where now there's a skatepark, but then it was owned by the big motorcycle dealers Pride and Clark. At 14, after school, the 109 bus to Brixton,  I used to lust after motorbikes in that shop. But was it really all red, or did Antonioni do one of his well-known paint jobs on it for effect?

All I really want to do is thank Iain Sinclair and his collaborators for another beautiful, essential book, which allows me to shudder about the present and the future as well as wallow in the past.

Right round the Ginger Line to catch Iain Sinclair's musings on underground Hackney and overground London

The Round Chapel, aka  the Clapton Park United Reform Church, was the suitably atmospheric venue for Iain Sinclair's readings from his latest work,  London Overground: A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line

True to the ethos of this so-called blog, I tried to use only the most appropriate means of travel to reach the Lower Clapton Road for an evening with Iain Sinclair, who was kicking off a whole week of talks organised by the Hackney Historic Buildings Trust.

As Sinclair was billed to talk about both subterranean Hackney and his new book on walking the Overground, it seemed fair enough to travel both by Underground (Clapham North to Highbury and Islington on Northern and Victoria lines) and Overground (Highbury & Islington to Hackney Central). The journey took about half the expected time - so this clueless reporter arrived at the ancient St Augustine's Tower, on Mare Street, about an hour before the event was due to start.

Which was great for two reasons - first I had time to reacquaint myself with Hackney, and apart from the pedestrianisation of upper Mare Street, it seemed mercifully not too different to how I remember it in the early 1980s (so unlike London Fields just down the road, which seems to have a totally different atmosphere now).

This bit of Hackney is still almost aggressively ungentrified.  I mean by that that the streets are full of people, people of all ages and classes and races, and I suppose what I really mean too is that there are a lot of not very well-off people, these people are still in the majority. It's perverse to say this, but I like that. There are still plenty of ordinary cheap and cheerful shops, and not an artisanal bakers in sight (I did find an artisanal booze shop but that's a different thing altogether).

I remembered the bus station off wonderfully named Bohemia Street, and the famous church tower - but I had forgotten how lovely and extensive the old church grounds were, and how the graves have all been pushed to the perimeter and stacked up against the walls.

I had also forgotten that this talk was not in the old tower at all, but in the Round Chapel.  I'd never been there, and assumed it was somewhere near the old tower or the new church - but it wasn't. I enjoyed walking around Sutton Place with its immaculate Georgian terrace, and then headed up Lower Clapton Road on a hunch - and there it was , unmistakable and magnificent, the Round Chapel as beautifully restored by the HHBT, like some grandiose Roman temple dropped into the chaos of London E9.

You could sort of tell it was going to be a Sinclair event; quite a few  blokes of a certain age, close cropped grey hair, black jeans, black jackets, not many hipsters to be honest. But inside the crowd was very similar to those at the National Trust talk on 575 Wandsworth Road I attended a few months back - local history buffs, solid, smiling white-haired couples, probably retired, in their late 60s or older, knowledgeable, affable, friendly, curious, intelligent, lovely people.

Oddly, Sinclair himself almost seemed to be part of  this demographic. Couldn't help thinking, hasn't he  aged  well? He's positively handsome, tall, slim, in slightly smarter jeans and shirt and specs than most of the audience - but then again, his distinct professorial look does set him apart. One of us, sort of, but also one of them. Not a hint of eccentricity there really, despite the high rounded dome of his skull. And so much the better, so much of that is affectation - but what he has in abundance, is passion! Energy!

He talked and read for an hour without break or sip of water, he got excited about his many subject, he went off on some of his famous, Sinclair-patented verbal riffs, rhapsodising the old Dalston to Broad Street line before fit was co-opted into Boris Johnson's shiny new world. A local journalist asked him to mention Haggerston Baths, which are (inevitably) threatened with closure and re-developing as luxury flats. No problem, he had already planned to talk about this amazing tunnel-like building.

I love how he compared the great mole-man of Hackney, William Lyttle (whose work, it seems is to be preserved and used by the hipsters, thank god, they do have their uses) with the present day burrowers of mega-basements, which are supposed to make their multi-million pound pinched terraced houses  something they can really feel rich in - with swimming pools, gyms and private cinemas, wine cellars and underground car -parks.

Probably that's where their staff have to live as well, Wellsian style. I like the way he got the Olympic Park perimeter fence into this discussion, as though it had been broken up and redistributed to hide their furtive diggings.

I love the way he pointed out how on parts of the overground, people are all reading books, then at certain points they all change and the new lot are all tapping at smartphones or tablets.

Getting to the Round Chapel itself, Sinclair's riffing hit a sort of Coltrane-style high with his remarks on how this place was  usually empty, and how it always had time to recover from the impact of a human audience, but how each group or congregation had left strange traces in the atmosphere of this great meeting hall.

I knew he had mentioned Angela Carter in the new book (which, to my shame, I have not yet read), and so I was hoping he'sd maybe talk a bit about this stage of the walk. It's amazing to think that one of the greatest psycho-geographical amblers on the planet has been wandering through one's own neighbourhood, and I was longing to find out what he thought of it all.

Clapham definitely needs some forensic dowsing, there's a lot of bad stuff here, and it comes out, occasionally, in terrible violence on the Common, in the gormless hedonism of Clapham High Street of summer Saturday evening, the vomiting, the fighting!

All that and the Clapham Sect and the  Temperance movement too. And poor old Natsume Soseki in his miserable bedsit on The Chase, 25 yards form the house where Angela Carter lived her final decades.

But he skipped this bit, and located poor Angela in Wandsworth, rather than in the Lambeth bit of Clapham where she lived and died. I think he was more excited by J G Ballard and Chelsea Harbour, and I can understand that - there is a real symbol of the changes of the last three decades, the 80s flash harry marina, and so on.

I'm sure he does her more justice in the book. I know he writes at length about another low-profile hero, the school of London painter Leon Kossoff,  who provides a neat link between the East end beauty of  Arnold Circus with the oceanic railways scenery of Willesden Junction.

One thing I don't know if Sinclair comments on is the strange way Overground leapfrogs over the whole of Brixton, just given passengers the slight frisson of  views of the dark interiors and backyards of the covered market, and glimpses of a heaving Electric Avenue. But then it clunks on, moaning, as Sinclair points out, in never quite consummated pre-orgasmic pleasure, to hit my  drab home station - Wandsowrth Road, and the short walk home past number 575.

Good, I have short-circuited this entry, which was well into the early stages of morbid tediousness. It's time to start reading the real thing, and to abandon this messy regurgitation of last night's Hackney word feast.

London Overground: A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line by Iain Sinclair is published by Hamish Hamilton inn 4 June 2015, price £16.99

The Chase: Clapham's street of no shame

Each day I come home across the northern corner of Clapham Common, then turn right into my street.

Over the road are the beautiful walled gardens of Trinity Hospice, wonderful at any time of year, but especially so in spring, with its abundant wisteria and blossoming trees. This hospice - rightly venerated across the city - still operates according to the policies of its founders, that is - offering a place to anyone i need within its catchment area, regardless of anything else, wealth included.

If only the rest of this street, my street, where I have lived since 1985, could adhere to such policies.

Up on the wall to your left as you turn the corner from Northside into The Chase are two plaques.  Not genuine blue plaques denoting former residents of historical significance. No, these are a less impressive blue, one mid-blue, one dark, but they are not the real thing, not real London Blue Plaques.

Instead,  they are privatised plaques, essentially boasts, commemorating two street parties held in this road, one for the queen's 60th anniversary of accession to the throne,  possibly, and the other for the royal family wedding, a year or so later.

I can't remember the exact dates but I do remember the rather off-putting invitations, stuffed through our front doors back then. They invited us all to join in honouring said royals at "street parties".

 The Chase would be closed to traffic and the residents were invited to buy tickets for a feast in honour of, well I suppose the Queen herself, and ... I can''t remember who the others were - possibly Charles' son's wedding to Ms K. Middleton?

I have no interest in  England's royal family. They seem in some cases to be rather silly, annoying people, I am never sure why they are given the opportunity to comment so often. I do not generally believe them when they speak, it seems like they are actors, voicing someone else's lines.

 I'm sure they'd have similar or even stronger feelings about me. You can't really hate them, they are too bland.  The ones I loathe are the media arse-lickers who seem to think we all want them to plaster photos of these dreary folk all over the front pages of newspapers, and all over every TV news bulletin.

So, I have to admit, it rather annoys me every day, seeing these plaques commemorating these events which gave a few well-heeled households in this street the chance to advertise their patriotism and their connections and their good taste in catering to each other. It is still, in this country, a matter of who you know, or worse still, where you went to school or university.

But why did they have to stick these plates on the wall? It is the equivalent of me putting huge photos of Castro or Che Guevara or even poor old Ken Livingstone over my windows.

I wish I had a similar wall onto which I could screw plaques reflecting my own political views. Living on the top floor of a decaying chunk of jerry-built housing - one the luftwaffe should have put out of its misery, but narrowly missed - I do not.

I wish I had had the nerve to organise a street party  to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of this street's one truly great recent resident, Angela Carter. That might be something good: but I'm sure her many friends and fans and family me members will do something good, in 2017, for this great author.

It happens that there is a genuine Blue Plaque on a house in this street, directly opposite where I live. It marks the spot where the Japanese novelist, Natsume Soseki, spent a couple of extremely unhappy and uncomfortable years in London in a miserable Clapham boarding house. That house is now worth approximately £2.5 million. Or perhaps much more...

I doubt if many people will visit this part of Clapham to see where some wealthy residents glugged a lot of champagne in honour of the royals on those days. By contrast, almost every day through the summer, taxis and minibuses stop outside 80 The Chase to disgorge Japansese tourists, young and old, here to pay tribute to Japan's answer to Dickens or Henry James, and to visit the small museum in the flat at no 80b.

Maybe a Japanese themed street party would tick all our boxes?

Meanwhile, another "only in The Chase" sighting today - one of those home-made posters asking people to pick up their dog's shit. Only in this case, it came with a bag of Bob Marten's poo-bags, just in case the shames owners had forgotten to bring their own.

Hurrah!

When a novel sucks you in

If you read much recent fiction you'll sometimes get that feeling that - yes, that is exactly right, I have been there, this is precisely how I felt, I know this place, I know these people.

It first happened when I was reading  Geoff Dyer's autobiographical novel The Colour of Memory.
There's a bit where he's describing a sunset over Acre Lane, Brixton, and I imagined myself cycling in the opposite direction, from Clapham and into that exciting exotic world that so many of us wanted to inhabit, back then in the early 1980s.

That was a book that was making me kick myself every other page - why hadn't I written this, or something like it?


Reading John Lanchester's London blockbuster, Capital, I'm getting even more hyperlocal vibrations, in fact at times I feel like I am trapped inside the book. The sensation is there in a way that it is not in many other novels based partly or wholly in this part of south London, simply because he makes it clear exactly where most of the action is happening. And most of it is within a quarter mile of where I am sitting now.

With its cast of multi-ethnic characters - from the posh white Anglo-Saxon bankers to the Polish builders, the Hungarian nanny, the Pakistani shop-keepers, the Zimbabwean refugee traffic warden - this novel could seem a little too obvious.

It has one of those spiralling or tessellated plots, with a fragment of one plot line laid down on top of the part of a previous one, building up to some strong false climaxes. It's based around such stock London subjects as greedy city types getting their comeuppances in the 2008 crash, mistaken arrests of Asians  under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, Banksy-style street art pranks, car parking, the curious world of premier league footballers and their managers, etc.

So yes, it is a bit clichéd - and you can find similar cast-sheets in the big London novels of the past decade , including two Zadie Smiths, one Alan Hollinghurst,  Blake Morrison's South of the River , etc -- but its got a lovely rolling plot-line that keeps you reading.

Though perhaps if you're not a Clapham resident the urge to read on to find out exactly which street Pepys road is based on will be lacking. The amount of research Lanchester must have undertaken is impressive - or perhaps he just lives here. He must have visited the hospice up the road (Trinity Hospice) and its sister church on the Common, Holy Trinity.

He gets most things absolutely right; maybe it's stretching it a bit to suggest a 17-year-old Senegalese football prodigy would relax by listening to Fela Kuti, but then again, why not - his dad might have introduced him to the Black President way back.

It's odd how these patches of the city have been so thoroughly trampled over by writers, though. The Common is a character here just as it is in Green's End of the Affair or Nell Dunn's Up The Junction.
You start thinking about what book Penelope Fitzgerald must have been writing in her study in Alma Road while Angela Carter was blending Clapham and Camberwell for her magic toyshop. Clapham often features as the low-point residence in a number of writers' ;lives - Sylvia Plath, Greene, Natsumi Soseki - and it is certainly no longer offers much in the way of a hospitable climate for the impoverished literary exile.

Just plenty of juicy and venal subject matter for highly clued-up writer-reporters like John Lanchester.

Angela Carter , a street in Clapham, and a homesick Japanese novelist

It's almost 30 years since I moved to this street. It was January 1985 - a very cold January. My father had just died, I was recovering from the funeral and all that fallout, and at exactly the same time I realised I was living in the same street as one of my favourite writers.

Clapham was a dirt cheap place to lodge
 when Soseki came here in the 1900s.
Two of the many often bewildered
 Japanese literary pilgrims photograph
 his Blue Plaque.

I remember going to buy a Sunday paper. I got back to my new  front door and realised, with a strangely un-panicked realisation, that I had forgotten my keys. There was snow blowing all around, settling lightly now. I was simply thrilled to have a new flat in what seemed to me at the time, a rather lovely street, wide and lined with beautiful, gaunt trees. And I no longer had a father.

Luckily the house was in scaffolding. I scaled the three or four ladders, I climbed over the parapet onto the roof, and  slithered down a drainpipe onto my own roof terrace and in through the bathroom window (I am too fat to do that now).

I made some coffee and started reading this plump bundle of newsprint. In the colour supplement, Ian McEwan was writing about visiting Angela Carter. As I read it I realised he was describing my own street. How the  terraced houses crowded together as if for mutual protection as they approached the social border of Wandsworth Road. How hers was one of those last houses before the badlands of the Battersea marshes and their sprawling estates.

How her famous visitors sauntered down the road, looking at house numbers, wondering, where on earth does she live?

I encountered her a few times in the newsagents, but I was a fan, awestruck, struck dumb, mumbling nonsense. "Hi. Keep well, it's freezing out there ...", etc.  Never daring to say how much I loved her writing.

After that I was always watching. I was so proud to have such a wonderful near neighbour. I found out all I could about her, and soon realised she was (like me) an aboriginal south Londoner.  She had even worked as a junior reporter for the Croydon Advertiser (I tried to get work experience there, they sent me away).

This amazing woman with her commanding presence, that face,  that beaming smile, the extraordinary cloud of grey hair, and then - not , as I remember, so long after, her child, the baby in the pushchair, the shy man who I imagined was her husband....

Soon after this, I discovered that another well-known writer had lived even closer. The Japanese novelist, Natsume Sōseki, had been sent to London as a young man, and had found miserable lodgings - about six doors up from where Angela Carter lived. Opposite  the house where he endured a foul
English winter is a small museum devoted to his works.  In the summer,  Soseki fans (usually middle-aged Japanese couples, or younger, often solitary, students) would arrive in The Chase to visit the museum, and to photograph the blue plaque. Often, I would see them looking puzzled,  and think, should I volunteer some information? Offer them tea? Then think, well, they will soon find what they seek - and the last thing they want is inadequate help from some bumbling, clumsy Englishman.

The Blue Plaque was added about five years ago, a crumb of comfort to those Soseki followers whose plans to erect a statue of the writer on Clapham Common had been thrown out after a particularly mean-minded and xenophobic campaign by the so-called "Friends of Clapham Common".

Angela Carter lived in Japan in her 20s, and I assume she was well aware of this connection. But was it a coincidence that she moved  into this street? As much as Soseki loathed London, and especially loathed Clapham, so Angela Carter seemed to feel at home here.

I wonder how she'd feel now, about this street, dominated as it is by super-rich city types with their Range Rovers and Aston Martins, their royal connections, their street parties for the queen's jubilee and the wedding of william and kate. I wish she was still around to ask, because now, having shed that vile false modesty and shyness of the hobbledehoy, I would ask her too.