Authors Electric

I never really wanted to leave London once I got there, but I guess everyone has to grow up and buy a house and a washing machine some time. I’d been living in the city for more than a dozen years and had ended up renting a flat beside the river in Chiswick, the waters at high tide lapping just metres from the window where I stationed myself and my typewriter every day. The flat was in the home of an elderly widow whose husband had been curator of antiques at the Victoria and Albert Museum and one of whose sons was a Cabinet Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Our flat had once been the family’s “nursery wing” and the surrounding house was a wonderland of cobwebs and curiosities. I would quite happily have sat there, watching the waters flow by, for the rest of my life. Our landlady, however, turned out to be mortal and passed away after we had been there five years. The family needed to sell the elegant old house to someone who would then brush away the cobw...