The Go-Away Bird

There is no plaque yet on No 13 Baldwin Crescent, otherwise known as ‘Dunedin’. There ought to be. For on the top floor of this shabby yellow-brick house, hidden away between the Camberwell New Road and gloomy Myatt’s Fields, Muriel Spark wrote most of the four or five novels for which we’ll remember her. She was as happy in leafy, run-down Baldwin Crescent as she ever had been or was to be in her long, tense, proud, unforgiving life. She did, it is true, make an excursion to her childhood Edinburgh home to re-immerse herself in the speech of Morningside while she wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in four weeks. But all her other masterpieces — Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors and much of The Girls of Slender Means — were written within a glorious period of only five years in her two attic rooms in Camberwell. After she left, she never lived in Britain again.

Because she was so stunningly original and burst upon the leaden postwar scene with such a delicious sizzle, as though this was the first time we could afford proper fireworks again, it is easy to forget how beautifully rooted in their settings those early books are. She had only just begun writing novels at the age of 39, having thought of herself till then as a poet. Yet in a few masterly lines she gets up for us the clapped-out pubs and factories of Peckham and the boozy gangs wandering across the Rye as indelibly as she does the corridors of Marcia Blaine School for Girls and the Princess May of Teck Club, based, quite closely, on her times at James Gillespie’s High School for Girls and the Helena Club in Lancaster Gate respectively. She was a realist before she was a surrealist.