London Belongs to Me (Penguin Modern Classics)

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There was also a six-part television series in 1977, again with a roster of the best of British, including a young Trevor Eve. Third floor back’ is the chancer Connie, an elderly exactress who takes advantage of Mr Josser’s kindly nature on a regular basis. My dad, had tenants and I remember going with him on rent visits and trying as a child to work out how these different people all came to bel iving under the same roof.

Percy is quite the young man on the up, making a name for himself as a successful mechanic, with dreams of owning his own garage one day.like egret’s feathers’ muddles though each successive domestic disaster, haunted by his wife’s anxieties one moment and demented by his brother-in-law’s fabulous eccentricities the next; the homicidal lackwit Percy Boon (boor, loon), prey to trashy violent American culture, particularly gangster films; there is the fifth-rate spiritualist medium, slippery Henry Squales (squalid, eels) down at heel and faking his way hilariously though the séances; and the ageing, former ‘actress’ Connie Coke (conniving, croak), derelict and desperate, health ruined by the fags and booze who even now leads ‘the sort of life that parsons preach against’. He’s really good on the various stages Percy’s all-too-credible self-centredness, from pre-crime, to during crime, to the long consequences of the crime, details of which I should not mention. Otto is something of a pantomime Nazi, with his conscientious ‘Sieg Heils,’ his unquestioning acceptance of party ideology and his worship of Hitler.

On the basis of this book, I would compare Norman Collins favourably with Charles Dickens in his ability to observe and comment on characters and situations, with subtle underlying humour (although I would rate Collins far more readable than Dickens). Even when inside on a murder charge, Percy is still dreaming of pulling off the big job that will allow him ‘one day (to) have my own racing team - Boon Specials’.

London Belongs to Me is Norman Collins’s best-known book, first published in 1945, regularly reprinted throughout the fifties and sixties, once in 1977 and most recently by Penguin in 2008. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. This is a novel about the lives, with all their trials and tribulations, and successes and failures, of a diverse group of people, struggling to cope with everyday life, in most cases on a very meagre budget. He and Doris (Mr Josser’s daughter upon whom he has designs) would live in their own house with a garden out in the suburbs and join a posh tennis club.