London Belongs to Me (Penguin Modern Classics)

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There is one major difference with respect to Sillitoe’s vernacular novels: his characters are resolutely, rebelliously, proletarian; but the residents of 10 Dulcimer Street, especially the landlady, wield their shabby genteel (with the accent on the former adjective) lower middle class manners like weapons, and keep their proverbial aspidistras flying like battle colours. Her forbidding exterior usually revealed a heart of gold, as it does with Mrs Oakes, whose gruff Yorkshire demeanour serves to hide her emotions as she cares for the pilots of Bomber Command in a hotel in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Somewhere in our loft, there is a box containing jigsaws, board games and a very particular pack of ‘Old Maid’ cards dating from the 1940s. Facing her own destitution, Connie could be forgiven for her fits of tears and melancholy as she lies in her lonely bed, but she always manages to find a reason to carry on, especially when it involves sticking her nose in where it’s not wanted. I’ve never had time to listen but now I’m unemployed and will have to go back and start listening to all of them from the beginning (which will undoubtedly add even more books to the TBR list.

Boards have moderate shelf wear with mild bumping and fraying to corners and crushing and fraying to spine ends. Mr Puddy, the curve of whose decline in employment status intersects with the upward trajectory of Percy Boon’s meagre ambitions in the criminal underworld, has a cluster of gastronomic habits which shock us into a realisation that junk food – like the futility of elementary education – is not an entirely modern phenomenon.

The cast included Derek Farr as Mr Josser, Madge Ryan as Mrs Vizzard and Patricia Hayes as Connie Coke. Getting up to no good comes naturally to washed up, elderly actress Connie, who lives above the Boons with only her canary for company. For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. At its best the book is a directed but unforced tour of aspects of British – English – culture during wartime: a world of “chimney pots and telegraph wires”, of Bakelite and green baize, of séances and boxing matches (“The Tiger entered the ring in his celebrated striped dressing gown, allowed his seconds – two bullet-headed thugs like escaped convicts – to disrobe him as though he were too well-bred to do that kind of thing for himself, and stood there, like a cockerel, turning himself about for the people to admire him”), and of Lyons’ Corner Houses and miserable London weather, where “it was as though someone had deliberately smeared a wet dirty cloth across the sky”. Perhaps it isn’t strange after all; this article came to be written in the month that the remains of Roman baths were discovered at Borough Market, so perhaps the author could have added, ‘and in Caesar’s day before that’.

Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. The film includes the first screen appearance of Arthur Lowe, who makes a brief and uncredited appearance as a commuter on a train. The film concerns the residents of a large terraced house in London between Christmas 1938 and September 1939. I'd just finished reading five novels by Patrick Hamilton (Hangover Square, The Slaves Of Solitude, and the Gorse Trilogy); a biography of Patrick Hamilton (Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton); and a biography of Julian MacLaren-Ross (Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Bizarre Life of Julian Maclaren-Ross). Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking.You will not find it on a map, but there would be no prizes for working out that Collins intended it to be located in the quadrant of streets bounded by Kennington Park Road, Camberwell New Road, and Walworth Road, an area which, despite its refined obscurity, holds a unique literary pedigree for it was right across the road (in the ‘Holland Grove beat’) that Conan Doyle set the scene of Sherlock Holmes’s first appearance (the murder of Enoch J Drebber in A Study In Scarlet). Also known as Dulcimer Street, Norman Collins’s London Belongs to Me is a Dickensian romp through working-class London on the eve of the Second World War. Mr Josser’s participation in the South London Parliament reflects the helplessness of the wider body politic in the face of Nazi aggression and expansionism. The appeal of London Belongs to Me is in its easy fluency and compelling serial storylines, and in its satisfying representation of a place and time which feels nostalgic but was written as contemporary reporting.