The novelist on her arrival in postwar London and how she revisits the bombed-out city in her writing
It was on my 15th birthday, in September 1946, that my real life started. I, along with my all-female family – mother, grandmother and older sister – arrived at Tilbury in the good ship Rangitiki and set foot on English soil. What an excitement. I was a literary groupie from the antipodes. England at last: land of books, where writers one had heard of actually lived and breathed! Not that I had any intention of being a writer at the time – too much like hard work. All I wanted was to get married and have babies.
When we landed my mother had £90 in her pocket, and no husband, no job, no home, few friends. She was brave but rash. The first thing we did was hotfoot it to Hampstead, to the world she’d known before the war – of writers, artists, musicians, great conversations, great parties. Perhaps there she’d get a job? But the family home in Adelaide Road was no more, too shaken by bomb blasts to survive, and, worse, the whole vibrant north London cultural society had disintegrated too. Still, we’d stay in north-west London and wait for its recovery.
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