Free An Education by Lynn Barber Page B

and clamber over dining tables even to get from the front door to the staircase. But on the top floor I found three empty rooms more or less intact and a working loo and basin. Moreover, one of the bedrooms had a mattress on the floor and some scattered clothes I thought I recognised as David's. Nic found a mattress for me and a chair. Then he went away and I spent my first night in the house alone, too cold, too terrified, too excited to sleep.
    Next day I bought an electric fire and managed to scavenge another chair, some blankets and a lamp from the furniture piles downstairs. Then I heard the front door open and the slow noisy progress of someone clambering over the furniture and up the stairs. Would it be a burglar or would it be…? ‘Oh, hi,’ I said, dead casual. ‘Nic said I could stay here for a bit. Hope you don't mind.’ ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I'll help you find some furniture.’ So we went and heaved furniture about till lunchtime and ended up with quite a good haul – a very grand bateau-lit bed, two button-back Victorian armchairs and a splendid Turkey carpet. David said there was a kitchen somewhere in the basement but it was too jammed with furniture to get into, so we went for lunch at a workers' café and then to the Tate Gallery and on the bus back he kissed my cheek, and that was it really.
    We spent the whole of that freezing winter in Grove-way, and it was one of the coldest winters on record. The first present David ever bought me was a mangy fur coat from Oxfam, which was just what I needed – I wore it to go to the loo. But we managed to make our room into a sort of nest, hung and swagged with every curtain, rug, blanket we could find. We took baths at Camberwell Public Baths, cadged meals off friends, gradually excavated the kitchen and learned to cook – or rather David learned to cook while I signally failed to. He was studying Larousse Gastronomique and producing perfect soufflés while I was still struggling with corned-beef hash.
    Our friends all said we were ‘so brave’ to live in Stockwell. Nowadays SW9 is considered a smart address but in those days it was a grim, rundown area, still with lots of bomb damage from the war and horrible rotting council estates. Brixton, a mile up the road, was entirely West Indian; Stockwell was whiter, mainly Irish, but 100 per cent poor. Most of the houses in Groveway were divided into bedsits and all the cars in the road were wrecks that the O'Hagan brothers on the corner were meant to be repairing but never did.
    But Stockwell was changing and one day David came back with a strange purple object and said it was an aubergine and he'd bought it in the local greengrocer's. ‘Don't you see what this means?’ he said, ‘It's like the twig the dove brought back to the Ark.’ ‘No, I don't see,’ I said. ‘I thought you said it was a vegetable.’ So he explained it meant there must be other middle-class people in the area, people who read Elizabeth David, people who knew what to do with an aubergine. It meant the area was ‘coming up’. And indeed no sooner had he said it than our street was full of skips and estate agents' signs, and the Irish house over the road that used to have twenty doorbells and a heap of scrap iron in front suddenly had one tasteful brass knocker and a castor-oil plant. Stockwell – and particularly Groveway – was suddenly as hot as Notting Hill is now (Princess Diana would go to dinner parties there a few years later). Which meant that banks were falling over themselves to lend Nic the money to do up our house, and we had to move. It was fine – by then I'd bagged David and would never let him go.
    Why was I so sure David was The One? Well, first and foremost, because he was gorgeously handsome and remained gorgeously handsome all his life. People say you shouldn't marry for looks but I disagree: if I tot up all the pleasure I got from looking at David over the years I'd say it amounted to a very