Joanna Briscoe

I WRITE this sitting by the kitchen sink. But the kitchen sink has a view of London beside it, and that feels simultaneously perfectly mundane and like some kind of miracle, as though every bookish childhood fantasy of mine is projected onto my window, and I’m still not sure what’s real.

Those raised in London can have no real idea of what I’m talking about, but to me, the very concept of a London childhood was so impossibly glamorous from my muddy West Country vantage point that I couldn’t get enough of reading about children who lived among soot and cabs and pigeons.

As a girl growing up in the 1970s, becoming a novelist, or “authoress” as I termed it then, seemed a lofty but possible career from a young age, because women had always been writers. It was a rare equal opportunities profession for someone raised at that time.

My favourites – Frances Hodgson Burnett, E Nesbitt, Dodie Smith, Enid Blyton, Rumer Godden, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mary Norton, Joan Aiken, Alison Uttley, Richmal Crompton and Noel Streatfeild – had produced decades’ worth of truly great literature for children, and just as country-set novels made sense of the remote villages and valleys in which I lived, London-based novels filled me with awe and aspiration.

Those blessed literary protagonists who lived on the Monopoly board were so casually urban. That Ballet Shoes’ Fossil sisters could wander down the road to the V&A seemed the height of sophistication, even the poorest characters chic.

The children’s London home in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, outside which the flying bed arrives, seemed breathtakingly urban, with red bus and London bobby details, and I remember learning the term “area” from it. A Little Princess’ Sara Crewe’s London where “the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed” may as well have been Narnia, given there were no streetlights or shops of any kind where I lived and dreamed.

The grimier London of Carbonel or An Episode of Sparrows seemed equally intriguing, just as the Cockney street sweepers of Mary Poppins were as exciting as what was clearly something of a mansion on Cherry Tree Lane. The greatest London novel always seemed to be The Hundred and One Dalmatians, with its descriptions of Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park. Just the words “Outer Circle” were enough to inspire a lather of fantasising.

The Dalmatians later escape to Suffolk, just as so many literary protagonists leave London for the country, but for me, my plans were all about the opposite journey, and I’d have rather been in Park Lane than Willoughby Chase. Having spent all my adult life as an author within the borough of Camden, an existence so determinedly metropolitan, I can only look back at those early novels as inspiration for both location and profession.

We hicks continue to drape the capital in magic, and I can only say that brings happiness.

Joanna Briscoe’s latest novel, The Seduction, is published by Bloomsbury