In the mid-1980s, I was in my early 20s and was reading for the Bar London. I was living in a mud bed in Balham and regularly returning to the comfort zone of my native York when a friend told me to go to a room in a shared house in Leytonstone.
Not much E11. I wasn’t expecting trees, for example, but my walk was pleasant the art of decoction of the pipe station me by the roads better described by the roads. The house itself was almost the last seen in London, an illusion created by its proximity to Wanstead Flats. It was a prominent, detached house of the 1920s, with a red and white roof, and it had a name, but I will call it a village.
In all the rooms there were fireplaces, and most of the fires were lit on that autumn evening, when the door was answered by the kindly boss of the village, an elegant old Etonian doing a PhD in history. Others were academic poets and his wife was a painter. They were all a few years before me, and I loved them immediately.
At my “interview” for the room, they explained that they were renting the farm from a housing estate, as the outlook for the M11 link road, which would connect the M11 with the A12 flatter, would provide much of Leytonstone, and possibly the village.
It was a slow moment in my first stay when I took the Guardian from the kitchen to my bedroom. The boss was quite adamant about it: “The chef doesn’t leave the kitchen.” Otherwise, the reports were harmonious. My three housemates set the civil tone that I affected. They taught me how to cook, starting with a ragu sauce, a stew – so to speak, which every communal house contains. They encouraged my Romans: “Take her to dinner, Andrea. We will clean it up if you like. There was a TV in the large, wood-ceilinged room, but no one ever watched it. We had a lot of time to listen to the records while lying on the leather chaise longues (the house was full of chaise longues).
I remember the poet asking me to sing Talking Heads stay hungry and also that he loved the lines: “Here’s that rhythm again/ En my shoulder.” There was a white telephone on the telephone table. The messages were carefully taken: “Andree, your father called. Call it back if you like.
He had a dog for boss, a slim and intelligent mix, called Ben. I often walked Ben on the Wanstead Flats, known for low fog in winter. I have heard the false comment that Alfred Hitchcock, who was born in Leytonstone, was nourished across the way by the crown tower of Snaresbrooke Hall that stood overlooking that cloud.
I always had an image of a winter scene when I recalled the village. My memory falls on a certain late Saturday afternoon: the rowboats were frozen in the ice in the hollow of the lake; The winter sun is beating down behind Alfred Hitchcock’s hotel. Ben keeps falling into the fog, I always find the stick I just threw amazingly, sometimes I crash into the fog with him because I’m trying to beat him sometimes. Returning to the village, we meet in the high street; They play football in the greenhouse where they buy onions for the stew.
I was in the village at the time The great storm of October 1987and the King’s Cross a month later. I might have been caught in that fire, but the pestilence which once made me fly in the evening to York. As for the weather, I knew that the village was immune to the winds, although it was surrounded by tall trees. Nothing really bad could happen there, because something really bad had already happened: some idiot had signed the M11 bond.
Construction was completed in the mid-1990s, and I left a few years later. The village survived, but, as if infected by the great canyons polluted by roads, it is less beautiful than before. Its Crittall windows were replaced by plastic glasses, and so on; but it has always been so. I felt so at home there that I knew the situation was temporary and conditional. He had given me a gift of a horse; I saw what it was, and I knew where not to look.