In The Garden of England

It’s the third week of June, so I must be in West Wickham, Kent, and the weather must be incredibly sunny and warm one minute and overcast/breezy the next.

Although the postcode here is Kent, this is an outer suburb of south-east London. And it’s serenely suburban here in this quiet street of homes built in the 30s. The house in which I’m staying was built in 1936, and has been in the same family ever since: it has its original oak doors, fire places, and paneling; a hatch between the kitchen and dining room; an outhouse that still (apparently) functions, though the indoor bathroom and loo were original features as well. The garden is long, broad for an English garden. Its centerpiece is a large oak tree, reaching towards neighboring gardens on both sides.

I know I should be using English spelling, by the way, given that I’m in Kent, AKA The Garden of England, but I’m out of the habit.

I’ve been sleeping well because of the utter quiet of the street. During the day I set up for work at the kitchen table, occasionally wandering out into the garden, or walking down to the local newsagent to get a paper. At least four London taxi drivers appear to live in this stretch of the road. (I see the parked cabs. Great powers of deduction: I will become a detective when the writing thing palls.)

The West Wickham shops are a twenty-minute walk to the south-west; the Bromley shops, bigger and brasher, are twenty minutes to the north-east. From Bromley South I can get a non-stop train to Victoria: it takes 17 minutes. It’s a good thing the shops are a decent walk away, so I’m not tempted to fritter away my days trying on clothes in Zara and lolling around outside the Slug and Lettuce, or – worse – nipping into central London on some research-gathering pretext.

On Friday afternoon I rewarded myself – for a) surviving my course and b) managing to trek from Beaconsfield to Bromley during a tube strike – by traveling into the West End to see a movie (In the Loop). The cinema was the Odeon in Panton Street, one of the places I used to frequent. Sometimes I think that my entire 20s was spent reading The Guardian and going to the movies. Hannah and Her Sisters in Leicester Square; The Double Life of Veronique in Mayfair; Unforgiven on The Haymarket; Cry-Baby in Notting Hill; Meet Me in St Louis at the NFT; Touch of Evil at the ICA; A Short Film About Killing up near the British Library; The Doors at Marble Arch; The Dead on … Charing Cross Road? St Martin’s Lane? I don’t know if that cinema is still there anymore.

Having felt the familiar exhilaration of London the day before, when I caught a taxi from Marylebone to Victoria, on Friday I got to experience the familiar exhausting crush of it all.  After the movie, I marched along Piccadilly en route to Hatchards. Someone was shouting from an upstairs window, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying: something about a bike. What bike? The bike a guy was tugging loose from its lock and pulling off the railings; he grabbed it and ran down one of the arcades. All over, just like that.

In Hatchards, a publishing company rep was carrying around a proof of a new William Trevor book. I asked the clerk upstairs when the book was coming out. He told me he’d never heard of William Trevor before, and hadn’t believed the rep when she said he was a major writer. I did my best to persuade him.

Aside from seeing movies and crime, I’ve been lying low. No social events at all,  with the exception of a lovely wedding in Buckinghamshire last weekend (which meant cramming all that weekend’s screenwriting homework into Sunday). My course at the NFTS was brilliant, but it involved a lot of late nights writing and thinking and scribbling and messing with software I’d never used before. On Thursday I felt a terrible withdrawal from the people I’d been spending long days with in the workshop. I miss my new friends! Now I want to press on with my screenplay, given that I have a semi-clue about how to proceed, but there are so many other projects in the queue, as ever – applications and proposals, chapters and research, synopses and revisions, books to finish, blah blah blah. When will I get my shopping done?

Today: onwards to Brighton, where my friend Sarah Rayner (fellow authoress) lives, for a two-night furlough. I can work anywhere, after all. 

Comments

[LB]

I lived in old blighty for many years, slightly north of Kent, mostly in Ealing Common. Your comment about old door handles reminded me of the moment when I touched a supposedly ancient door handle and recoiled in horror as the image of hands over the centuries exploded in my all too imaginative mind. I calmed down. I realised the door handle had been replaced, then wished it was the original handle, and that I could retrieve my feelings of horror and go with the flow. I did, and the door opened.