4 Billington Road

Sunny summer days can also bring horror

This was the first house I lived in after university. I was 21 and had hitched a lift from a Sheffield band who had a gig in London. They dropped me off at Victoria Station and I struggled across London with my belongings, to my new home in New Cross. A uni friend had a friend in a co-operative house with a spare room that I could have for a while.

I knocked on the door and was welcomed, sort of, by a women my age, who later told me that she thought my head was too big for my body. She meant physically. She meant that I was too thin, I think. Her dad worked for the Princes canning company in Liverpool, and he kept her stocked up with canned meat and fish.

The other occupants included the self-appointed boss of all things. Although he did nothing to keep the place clean or tidy, he had an obsession about the bath, bawling in rage if it wasn’t left spotless. He had taken over the living room with all his junk, so no one else could go in there. And he was nasty to me. I’m not sure why; I would have tried my hardest to be friendly as I needed somewhere to live. He probably fancied me, that’s what us girls tell ourselves when boys are horrible to us.

There was also a couple, both artists studying at nearby Goldsmiths college. There was disharmony here: she would come home from college covered in plaster of paris to find him in the kitchen where he’d been sitting all day, smoking.

The final resident was a very busy man, also an artist. He had part-time jobs all over the place and passed these on to me and others when he went travelling. One was for a shop in Marylebone called Largesse, which made clothes for “largesse” women. Twice a year, we had to send their customers a catalogue of new items. This involved stapling swatches on to a set of illustrations of women wearing seasonal designs. We then put them into an envelope, adding a pre-printed label and sticking on a stamp – all at a furious pace. The sort of thing I’m quite good at.

There was a little crew of us working away in the back of the shop at weekends. One Sunday, the owner arrived with two of her friends, carrying tureens. I was fascinated by what was in these and couldn’t help but peek at what they were eating. They were feasting on new potatoes in congealed butter and spleen (for those not in the know, this is so-called white offal, part of the animal’s lymphatic system).

I was also handed the job of cleaning the owner’s home in Barnes. It was a lovely house with a perfect cottage garden. I dusted and hoovered, even though it was already very clean. There was a small, carpeted room next to the kitchen with a sash window open to the sunny day. It had cupboards, but no furniture. I was curious as to what was in the cupboards and opened one of them to find a set of shallow shelves full of colourful cake decorations. It made me feel quite sad.

I had seen in the kitchen that she was cooking a whole chicken in a large pan of water. At lunchtime, she took out a plate of chicken and more new potatoes to eat on her garden table. I was hungry and wished she’d asked me to eat with her. I wondered why she liked her food cooked until soft. She had a small mouth and tiny teeth so maybe it hurt her teeth to chew.

Another of my cleaning jobs was in Kensington. The woman I was cleaning for thought I was very good at my job and said my mum would be proud of me. She was quite eccentric and would make me a cup of Mellow Birds, a brand of instant coffee popular at the time. But she would literally put in three dessert spoons of coffee – so not mellow at all.

She told me that her former husband, a surgeon, had operated on her foot, leaving her in pain for perpetuity. She had two daughters, one of whom was a foreign correspondent for ITV – very ahead of her time.

The other was not much older than me, in her mid-twenties. She used to leave her socks and knickers all over her bedroom floor. There was no way I could hoover around them, so I decided to put them to soak in a bucket. I ran into her once at a publishing launch party and she thought it very droll to ask me why I picked up her pants. “What else could I do?” I replied.

My other main memory of living in Billington Road occurred when a friend asked if I could help out on her stall in Portobello Market. It was the other side of London, so I had to get up early. As I was leaving the house, I heard this terrible noise – it sounded from another world, growling and screeching amplified by the stillness of a sunny Sunday morning. I was quite afraid, but I had to go.

When I returned, I was told that a tom cat had attacked his kittens, just a few days old, in one of the wardrobes in the house. He’d pulled two of their heads off as the mother cat tried to hold on to them.