Clapham omnibus

in december i had lived in my flat for 21 years and I gave a little party to celebrate. There were six of us, all between 40 and 60, but mostly in good shape and the only woman was beautiful. The party ended early, but I woke up the following morning feeling cheerful and it occurred to me that it had perhaps resembled some convivial gathering of the early 19th century, in which Charles Lamb might have taken part.

To mark the anniversary, I read my guests the entries in my diary for 14th and 15th December 1979. The first one read, "Moved my stuff from Bloomsbury to Stockwell: feeling of exhilaration of leaving only felt now. Later went home and to bed early." And the second, "Parents moved most of my stuff to London, day rather harassing. West end evening." Well, I was certainly cryptic when I was 24.

I had queued in the rain in Kennington for nine hours to get the flat, which was classified as "hard-to-let," to be offered to single people on condition that they shared the accommodation. I desperately wanted to live alone, and was terrified at first that the council would evict me when they discovered that I didn't have company.



That year, 1979, saw another significant move. My mother, by then divorced, left the terraced house in Crawley where I had grown up. I was alone in that house on my last evening there and spent a long time standing in darkness at the top of the stairs, looking down at the yellow reflection of lamp-posts and car headlights through our frosted-glass front door.

I was conceived very near my present flat in Clapham, on the top floor of a house kept by Poles. They threw my parents out on discovering my mother was pregnant and after some difficulty she and my father found a single room in Hornsey Rise, where I spent my first nine months. Both these Victorian houses are gone; an unexceptional shopping-parade occupies the place in Clapham, and a park in Hornsey Rise, where the 14 buses used to terminate.

For many years I had a fantasy that I would eventually move to north London when I had "made it," mirroring my parents' journey between my conception and birth. The fulfilment of symbolic patterns is of great importance to me. But I have given this up. North London is irretrievably alien now that I have lived in Clapham for 21 years.

My home has made possible the pattern of my mature years. If I had still been moving between unstable flatshares, I would have had to find a well-paid job. Being single wouldn't have helped, nor the fact that I was a student before the days of loans. I've been able to cock a snook at the world, living like an Anita Brookner heroine, but on the dole and south of the river. Of course, my life has not been fun. Endless dishonesty and parasitical ruthlessness are required to live on a tiny income. At my worst, I'm more like a Jean Rhys heroine.

These days I'm on the New Deal, training to be a teacher, a profession I loathe. But I can walk to the training centre in Brixton and I love the streets I pass through. George Gissing walked them before me. Stopping at a shop called The Barrow Boy to buy a Swiss roll on winter evenings gives me exquisite pleasure. I have hated all the jobs I have had, but I have loved the pastoral journeys, except the one to the BBC in Reading, which was too long. I had to stay in their hostel, away from my beloved home.

I have always wanted my flat to be more sociable. The squalor in which I lived for too long kept my friends away. Even now that I have cleaned it up, people don't visit me for some reason. But I'm a familiar figure on the Clapham streets, and I have even acquired nicknames, such as "Marks & Spencer" or "Prince Charles of Wandsworth Road."

I met the first of my old lady friends on the estate. Her husband had been secretary to Sir Oswald Mosley in the 1930s. They had also been stewards to the Mosleys on their country estate. There was nothing particularly fascist about my friend; she was just an old lady with cats. I used to go up to her flat on Sunday evenings to watch Mastermind, and she would give me tea with two biscuits and remark flatteringly on how much I knew. She died years ago, but the boy whom Lawrence of Arabia swerved to avoid in his fatal motorbike crash in 1935 still lives on the same balcony.

I remember the early days, when there were mice in the kitchen and I kept the kitchen door shut, scuttling in and out at top speed; my mother lying on the sofa and talking to me while I typed or word-processed some article at the table; the time in 1988 when I would walk all night and then revise my vocabulary for Classical Greek A-level as dawn was breaking on Clapham Common. Why do those three memories seem to symbolise it especially?

I'm beginning to think that I must move. Circumstances may demand it. I will never regret this place, but there was too much fear, it was poor, and despite its human consolations it was dull. The day after I leave, it will be as if I was never here. But for those 21 years I would draw the curtain in the evening at the bay window, and look out for some moments beyond the trees and the road, to the interlocking viaducts and the monster estates, and being alone had a strange joy. n