I’ve never forgotten a radio interview I heard a couple of years ago, in which Zadie Smith spoke passionately about her home turf of Willesden. As she described the sprawl of corner shops and backyards and overgrown lots that formed the background of her early life and the underpinning of her novel White Teeth, the interviewer broke in and said with evident surprise: ‘You seem almost to be saying that Willesden is beautiful.’ Zadie laughed, and then said: ‘I think it is.’
Walking around New Cross and down through St Johns into Lewisham yesterday, thinking about my novel and stomping about in the footsteps of its protagonist, I contemplated for the hundredth time the unappreciated nature, the invisibility almost of South East London. People refuse to look at it because they think it’s grotty. It is, but there it heroically stands. It’s a shipwreck of a place, with islands and oil streaks of ground-shaking beauty. My love for it defies all logic. Yesterday was a perfect London December day of blue air and rapier sunlight, filled with the coincidences that have become familiar to me when writing about London, with the things that you imagine really being there when you go to check up on them.
The words are going down fine, but there are so many of them! Never has writing felt so scary, so like swimming out of my depth. There’s a constant temptation to second-draft as I go along, just so I can get a firmer grip on what I’m doing. I mustn’t give in to it though. I know instinctively that the story must come first.
Houses on Amersham Road, SE14
Parkfield Road, New Cross
Houses on Parkfield Road, SE14
Houses on Lewisham Way, SE14