People's Choice Award: Stalking Ella Ryman

By Anna Keir

EXCERPT:

That autumn my walk home from the tube station took me across Haverstock Hill, down Belsize Park Avenue, left into Glenilla Road, then right into Lavender Sweep, a curve of dingy red brick semis, spec-built in the last years of Victoria’s reign.
     Ella Ryman, celebrated author and my reason for living in this part of London, lived in elegance a hop, a skip and a world away. Her Georgian home in a verdant street leading up to the Heath was four stories of a pale stone with black wrought-iron grilles on the lower windows and a clipped bay tree in a tub each side of the wind red door.
     In Lavender Sweep the houses faced a communal green - the Rec - shaped like a rugby ball, on the other side of which stood a cavernous blackened church and row of prefabs erected on a bombsite in the 1950s and still doing duty as doctor’s rooms and off licence some twenty years later. By then the Sweep had fallen so far it was sure to rise, although most of it was still divided into cheap flats or run-down boarding houses.
     Mrs. Indira Horvath owned the boarding house at Number Seven and occupied the ground floor with her teenage daughters. Rumour claimed the absent Mr. Horvath was a Hungarian who had fled to London after the uprising and taken a job in his uncle’s restaurant, opposite Patel’s greengrocers while he spied young Indrira, her hair jet black. He had just time to marry her, buy the house in Lavender Sweep and father two daughters, before popping out for some cigarettes one winter’s night and never being seen again.
     Life had wearied Mrs. Horvath.  Her hair was greying and her boarding house shabby, low on creature comforts and bound by outmoded rules. Her boarders were mostly girls from the white Commonwealth, in the first stages of getting to grips with a culture familiar, yet askew. Few stayed longer than a month. They teamed up and moved on to cheerier environments where they could pay loud music and have boyfriends to stay.  
     I arrived in spring, when new leaves on the Plane trees and fresh grass on the Rec softened the Sweep to something approaching romance, and stayed on through an usually hot, car-fumed melting tarmac summer. Autumn came suddenly, signalling a bitter winter. I was Mrs. Horvath’s longest staying boarder.
My slip of a room with its pocked lino and narrow, lumpy bed, its built-in wardrobe and utility chest of drawers, its gas fire and framed notice detailing extensive rules, its top of house view over chimneys and sky, was familiar the instant I saw it.
     By then I’d read each of Ella Ryman’s novels many times, hooked from the afternoon I lifted The World’s Window, the first of her books set in wartime London, from the school library shelf, and fell into its risky, bittersweet world. Now, eleven years and all eight of Ella’s novels later, I was at last here, not only in her part of London but living in rooms that looked exactly as I’d imagined her heroine, Sophie’s, in that first life changing novel. I embraced its every privation, seeing myself as Sophie, hunched over her meagre meals or warming her chilblains in front of the gas fire, while waiting for the sirens. I’d have welcomed rationing and five-inch baths; Mrs. Horvath’s economical cooking and inefficient heating was the next best thing.