The L-Shaped Room, Lynne Reid Banks,

The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks is a portal to me aged 17 or 18. The exact timbre of everyday concern, anxiety and self-establishment is painful when you recognise it. Like the music you preferred to dance to, then or now, the summation of dancing in your own time. Lynne Reid Banks and the L-Shaped Room, in Fulham in 1960, Leslie Caron and Tom Bell in the film version, all this is a cultural unit that encases me, with an inadvertent pregnancy at its heart, and therein the key to the rest of life. I bought my Penguin copy on March 13th 1965, wanting to know what the next piece of my life could look like if I were more of an urban creature. If I didn't answer an ad in The Lady magazine to rent a cottage in the Outer Hebrides, or to read to an old lady in Mousehole, Cornwall, in exchange for a cottage in the garden. I would write, read, and grow vegetables.

Yes, reader, I did. Write, read, and grow vegetables, in Ireland not in Cornwall. And the person I was reading to, was me.