It seemed very unlike the London I had known from my rare visits, a backwater (literally) of floating homes and flowers and trees in tubs, chairs and tables on the canal bank, someone even had a barbecue, brambles and stinging nettles and buddleia and builders’ rubbish, dumps of rubble and tin cans, plastic bags and bits of timber drifting on the green shining surface. And a backdrop of old and new buildings in the Edgware Road. Was the Stakis Hotel there then? The white tower was, the huge one with the scarlet piping on its top, so that it looks like a piece of equipment for a giant’s kitchen, a freezer maybe or a hi-tech cabinet. Dull, dark, ancient buildings were there too, all their windows broken and all their doors padlocked, and in the distance, though I knew nothing of this then, the old engine sheds and marshaling yards of Paddington Station. I walked along beside the trees, under the second bridge, and came to a path and a ramp and there, on the left, was the exit from the underpass whose entrance made me shudder when I looked at it from the other side. I didn’t have to go in, I turned my back on it, and went up in the open air and the sunlight to the Harrow Road roundabout and over Bishop’s Bridge to Paddington. It was easy, I could do it every day.

It’s an odd thing how success in a venture like that can transform, if temporarily, not just the problem that’s worrying you, but your whole outlook on existence. Suddenly I was happy. I had found a tunnel-free way to GUP and because of that become capable of shopping for food, even possibly cooking food in a basic way, of adjusting to life at old Mrs. Fisherton’s and somehow putting up with windows that looked out onto brick walls and an iron staircase.

I did find the shops and the food, though the things I bought in the beginning, a piece of ham I didn’t understand had to be boiled, various things that could only be cooked by microwaving, and beans I didn’t know how to slice, were a mistake. But the pizzas and the Dundee cake weren’t a bad choice. I lived on pizza and fruitcake, washed down with milk, for a week. The ham I gave to the little tortoiseshell cat, not knowing then what a vet later told me, that cats can’t digest pig meat. It seemed to do her no harm.