In my first year as a graduate student, I lived in a terrace house in York Street, Cambridge - a shabby, friendly part of town which had not yet been 'improved'. (True, the previous owners had built an 'extension', but it was very ramshackle, and they left the main drain in the middle of the kitchen floor.) One of my next-door neighbours was Mrs A., a bent, frail, spirited woman, about seventy years old. Her house was heated by coal and lit by gas, because when she and her husband came back after World War Two, the landlord told them the whole street was going to be demolished in six months and it wasn't worth putting in electricity. And after her husband died she could never be bothered.

LRB 19 December 1985 | PDF Download