I prefer to travel to the authors rather than have them coming to me, mainly because it puts them more at ease if they are on their own home territory. It is also easier for me to concentrate on the job of questioning and listening if I am not thinking all the time about whether I am being a good enough host. On this occasion, however, the author in question was between abodes and didn’t have anywhere suitable for us to meet.
My wife, who had some sort of domestic crisis under way, had not had time to ask any questions about who it might be with me in the front room that morning and was out when he arrived, returning in time to pop her head round the door and enquire if we would like a little lunch.
By the time we got to the kitchen she had laid everything up very prettily, being something of a domestic goddess in these matters, never able to do anything less than perfectly, and I introduced her to the amiable old man who followed me into the room.
I could see she was only half listening as we continued to chat, her mind on other matters until certain phrases seeped through whatever else she was thinking about and brought her eyes into focus. Gangster family names such as ‘Kray’ and ‘Richardson’ were being mentioned, as they so often are by Londoners of a certain age, and then our lunch guest made the casual comment, ‘so I had to clip him’, and her puzzlement seemed to clear.
I swear I could see a light coming on in her eyes before she quickly looked down at her plate and collected her thoughts, piecing together other things I had told her over the previous few weeks about a client who had been involved with the criminal gangs of south and east London; violent men who ruled Soho and much of the West End during the fifties and sixties. There had been a spate of these gangster stories being published after the success of a book called The Guv’nor by Lenny McLean, which came out at the end of the nineties. None of them came anywhere near to matching the sales of The Guv’nor, including the tale that we were working on that day. It found a publisher but it did not catch the reading public’s attention.
Fortunately our guest was happily launched on a string of stories and my wife had time to compose herself before she needed to ask if he was ready for some pudding.