The Christmas illuminations are going up in my corner of southeast London. The seasonal equivalent, inflatable Santas, are very much in evidence despite the fact that garden gnomes have fallen out of fashion. There are some pockets of conformity, where the streets observe a house style, but mostly it is a free-for-all. The mood among us suburbanites is one of defiance if the levels of outdoor decoration reflect a state of mind that is said to mirror economic prosperity.
I have always lived in the suburbs, within a small triangle of southeast London, which includes: Croydon in the west, Bromley in the east, and Norwood in the north. I know that for postal purposes it is called Croydon, but administratively and spiritually it is south London. When I was a child, my life seemed normal, so it was quite some time before I realized that the suburb of Croydon had a reputation for being a foul hole.
My older siblings fled to Switzerland and Australia as soon as the opportunity arose, never to return. They might have experienced the suburbs as a place of suffocating bourgeois complacency. They were not alone, as this is the position of poets, musicians and especially novelists. They were portrayed as a place where enlightened creative souls need to escape from to be more exciting. Staying put is like the bride of the Suburban Mr James, who hangs things upon the line as her life slips away. Suburban is not just a postcode, but a state of mind.
I enjoyed my time in the 1970s middle-class, cash- strapped Croydon area, but I never felt like an outsider. My walk to school involved judging other people's front gardens and my mother and I took it seriously, awarding points out of 10. We knew our place because ours only came in at a shameful four. I can still picture the one with the perfect lawn stripes. There is always room for improvement, so nine out of 10 is good. My idea was to live in a road with grass verges.
The ordinary shines in the land of pebbledash.
I moved in with my boyfriend when he lived in a terrace house overlooking Selhurst Park. If we drove to the supermarket, we would lose our parking space and have to walk miles back to carry the shopping, because we heard the roar of the home goal and saw the lights. When I was working in Bloomsbury, there were times when I wished we lived closer to the West End, or that the Walworth Road wasn't so long, but when the time came to move, we went even further out.
southeast London has been the setting for my fiction many times. It is the very thing that unbelievers hold against it that makes it such rich terrain for a novelist. It isn't like the city or the country. The ordinary shines in the middle of nowhere, in the small, telling details of a person's environment that they reveal their nature. The privet hedge between two properties that has been carefully trimmed up to the neighbour's boundary is more revealing of character than any other. Is a fly-tipped mattress at the end of a street of perfect front gardens a better representation of the collision between the haves and the have-nots, the well-behaved and the misbehavers? The semi-detached house is an arrangement that is peculiar to this country and offers a compromise between privacy and snooping.
The suburbs give the writer a perfect backdrop for light comedy. You have to think of the novels of Barbara Pym to see how class pretension and rivalries are funnier in the context of parish jumble sales than they are in the superyachts. The Good Life, One Foot in the Grave, Keeping up Appearances, The Rise and Fall of Reginal Perrin are just a few of the British sitcoms that use this setting to expose the collision between our desire to fit in and our need to break out. The depiction of loneliness and melancholy can be seen in the trickle of commuters trudging up the road from the station in the fog, the damp autumn leaves blowing into front gardens, and a lost glove impaled on park railings.
The idea that we can be fortified by small treats makes sense to readers.
I knew I had the perfect location for Small Pleasures when I came to write it. I didn't want my story to be about high-flying journalists or glamorous city-dwellers because the Fleet Street sensation was the seed of fact. This was going to be about people who were unfashionable, plain, over-the-hill, enduring lives of frustrated potential, and it needed a much smaller canvas. It had to be a local paper that was concerned with parochial matters, such as a meeting of the Crofton North Liberals, the theft of petrol coupons from the British Legion, and hints about the joy of vests. The rail crash of 1957 came to my attention when I found a reference to it in my research, even though I commuted regularly on the Charing Cross line. Researching the history of my area was enjoyable, the built environment had not changed much since the 1930s, and there were plenty of people who remembered the 1950s in great detail.
The book was finished and edited long before the outbreak, but the experience of a national lock down seemed to give it resonance. The streets were quiet, the shops were mostly closed, and everyone went back to their homes after dusk. In the face of shortages, people were making their own bread and sewing their own face masks, talking over the fence to their neighbours, and staying local. The spirit of 1950s suburbia was present.
Readers embraced the concept of small pleasures, taking comfort from simple things and finding dignity in modest expectations. This came as a surprise to me. I was suspicious of nostalgia and thought the world I had conjured was more like fog and soot than a rosy glow. The list of things that soothed Jean in the face of a somewhat arid existence was not a manifesto for living. A bar of chocolate parcelled out to last a week, a newly published book library, the first tulips of spring, and a glass of sherry before Sunday lunch are all things that can be found in a passionate and enduring relationship.
The idea that we can be fortified against disappointment or worse by little treats or a more thoughtful appreciation of some overlooked aspect of the natural world on our doorsteps chimed with readers. It was only natural that our appetites and horizons shrunk when the bigger pleasures were unavailable and when personal tragedies came thick and fast. There is a place for the more admirable 1950s suburban values of thrift, resourcefulness, and a horror of waste. Is anyone named Sherry?
W&N published Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers. You can buy it at guardianbookshop.com.
