London Belongs to Me (Penguin Modern Classics)

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She is obsessed with Mr Squales in the same way that Otto Hapfel is with Hitler and Percy is with Doris and as with them, it brings out her cruellest, most ungenerous side. Percy is not nearly as connected to anything outside his own concerns as Otto and is therefore much more dangerous.

Not a period piece at that time, but very familiar territory to people who had been young in the 30s, that is, people of my parents\’ generation. Here, we are in a lodging-house at 10 Dulcimer Street, owned by the widowed Mrs Vizzard and occupied by a raft of types: the recently retired clerk Mr Josser and his wife; Mrs Boon and her son, petty crook Percy (“‘Only fools carry a gun,’ he said to console himself for not having one”); the Pooterish Mr Puddy (“a man who for years had been plunging in and out of employment like a porpoise”); and Connie, a washed-up actress who provides the most affecting character portrait in the book. Ed Glinert read Classical Hebrew at Manchester University and in 1983 founded the city's listings magazine, City Life, which he edited until 1989. None of the characters however is bigger than the setting – from the train, trams, and offices, to the tea warehouse, where Mr Puddy, the lazy, but loveable nightwatchman has his chance to prove himself bigger than his flaws, to the grotty nightclub where Connie is forced to eke out a living for herself, this is where London comes alive.They all had their troubles of one sort or another, and when misfortune or disaster struck, they helped each other out. Otto is something of a pantomime Nazi, with his conscientious ‘Sieg Heils,’ his unquestioning acceptance of party ideology and his worship of Hitler. I was delighted to read this wonderful review of a book I first read, and loved, many years ago when I was a teenager. You want to know exactly how people lived, what they wore, what they ate, their furniture (furniture takes up more than a few paragraphs), how they ducked and dived and scraped a living in 1938 – look no further.

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. For some silly reason Mr Collins does this with two characters (and only two), and it wears out its welcome. So far, I can recommend “Fear and Trembling”, “The Character of Rain”, “Loving Sabotage”, as well as “Tokyo Fiancee”. He flits effortlessly from Connie, the aged desperately poor ex-actress, to Percy Boon, the young motor mechanic on the make, whose Dreadful Crime forms the main arc of the novel. I hesitated to start this because of its size (732 pages), but then read Antoinette's review and knew it would have to be taken off my shelf to read immediately.In adjusting for this with Norman Collins’ 736-page epic London Belongs to Me, now reissued in Penguin Modern Classics, I may overcompensate and end up underpraising it instead. London Belongs to Me (also known as Dulcimer Street) is a British film released in 1948, directed by Sidney Gilliat, and starring Richard Attenborough and Alastair Sim. The action takes place entirely within London, apart from a handful of scenes in the Home Counties, much of which has since been swallowed by London’s growing sprawl. The cast included Derek Farr as Mr Josser, Madge Ryan as Mrs Vizzard and Patricia Hayes as Connie Coke.

Thank you for this sounds like a ‘ good read’ but all other activity will come to a halt as won’t want to put down ! The novel flits back and forth between the viewpoints of the different characters, bringing them thoroughly to life with their own distinct voices that often had me laughing out loud with their freshness and vivacity.I’m about halfway through and I am breathless with anticipation, I can hardly put it down and I’m afraid I’ll stay up all night reading it, though I know I should slow down and stretch it out so it will last longer. The trustworthy lovers of Bridget [Jones’s] single girl, younger days in London are going to adore London Belongs to Me, the story of a girl (who could be Bridget’s younger American cousin! Meet Alex, a recent college graduate from Tallahassee, Florida in love with London, pop culture, and comic cons.

London is not just the delimited space where social transactions take place, London is also the people who live and work there; but mainly live there for those suburbanites, the ‘demi londoners’ who merely work there emerge each morning to simply to ‘play at being Londoners again’.

Dulcimer Street, se11, could be regarded as the novel’s central character, though it is darling old Mr Josser – the man on the tram rather than the Clapham omnibus, who cries when he retires from his job as a lowly but loyal clerk in the City – who provides the book’s continuity. Her forbidding exterior usually revealed a heart of gold, as it does with Mrs Oakes, whose gruff Yorkshire demeanour serves to hide her emotions as she cares for the pilots of Bomber Command in a hotel in the Lincolnshire Wolds. One of literature’s memorable charlatans, his poverty acute, his powers questionable, Henry Squales, aka Enrico Qualito the medium, is an actor’s gift. Today it is mostly forgotten, a cult classic, rather than a staple on the must-read list … although it was introduced to a new generation by retro chic pop group St Etienne with their 1991 track of the same name.