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In the mid-1980s, I was in my early 20s and was reading for the Bar in London. I was living in a mouldy Balham bedsit and returning regularly to the comfort zone of my native York, when a friend told me a room was going in a shared house in Leytonstone.
I wasn’t expecting much of E11. I wasn’t expecting trees, for example, but my walk from the attractive art deco tube station took me along roads better described as avenues. The house itself seemed almost the last one in London, an illusion created by the proximity of Wanstead Flats. It was a rangy, detached 1920s house, white with a red roof, and it had a name, but I’ll just call it the villa.
There were fireplaces in all the downstairs rooms, and most of the fires were lit on that autumn evening when the door was answered by the benign boss of the villa, an elegant Old Etonian doing a history PhD. The other tenants were a poet-academic and his wife, a painter. All were a few years older than me, and I liked them immediately.
At my “interview” for the room, they explained that they rented the villa from a housing association, since it was blighted by the prospect of the M11 link road, which would connect the M11 with the A12 – flattening much of Leytonstone, and probably the villa, in the process.
There was a sticky moment on my first day in residence, when I took the Guardian from the kitchen up to my room. The boss was quite severe about that: “The Guardian does not leave the kitchen.” Otherwise, relations were harmonious. My three housemates set a civilised tone that I aspired to. They taught me how to cook, starting with ragu sauce, the glue – so to speak – that holds together any communal house. They encouraged my gauche romances: “Have her round to dinner, Andrew. We’ll clear out, if you like.” There was a TV in the large, wood-panelled living room, but nobody ever watched it. We spent a lot of time listening to records while lying on velvet chaises longues (the house was full of chaises longues).
I recall the poet asking me to play the Talking Heads song Stay Hungry over and over again because he so liked the lines: “Here’s that rhythm again/ Here’s my shoulder blade.” There was a white telephone on a telephone table. Messages were punctiliously taken: “Andrew, your father called. Call back ‘if you feel like it’.”
The boss had a dog, a svelte and intelligent mongrel called Ben. I often walked Ben on Wanstead Flats, known for its low winter mist. I’d heard that the morbid imagination of Alfred Hitchcock, who was born in Leytonstone, was nurtured by the way the turrets of Snaresbrook crown court loomed threateningly from that mist.
I always picture winter scenes when recalling the villa. My memory focuses on a particular late Saturday afternoon: the rowing boats are frozen into the ice on the Hollow Pond; the winter sun is crashing down behind the Sir Alfred Hitchcock hotel. Ben dashes repeatedly into the mist, always miraculously finding the stick I’ve just thrown, and sometimes I dash into the mist with him, because I occasionally try to beat him to it. Returning to the villa, we make a detour to the high street; the football results are playing in the greengrocers where I buy onions for a ragu.
I was in the villa at the time of the great storm of October 1987, and the King’s Cross fire a month later. I might have been caught up in that fire, but the demoralisation that had once caused me to make evening flits to York had waned. As for the storm, I knew the villa would be immune from the hurricane-force winds, even though it was surrounded by tall trees. No really bad thing could happen there, because the really bad thing had already occurred: some idiot had signed off the M11 link.
Construction was under way by the mid-1990s, a few years after I left. The villa survived, but, as though infected by the great polluted canyon of the road, it is less beautiful than before. Its Crittall windows have been replaced by plastic double-glazing, and so on; but this was how it was always going to be. I had felt so at home there precisely because I knew the situation was temporary, conditional. The gift horse had plodded up to me; I saw it for what it was and knew where not to look.