Wednesday was a lovely day. I spent it walking Maida Vale from Carlton Hill to Park Place Villas, discovering for the first time streets or insertions into streets of houses apparently built in the twenties, and gathered in enclaves behind the towering Victorian terraces. Why were they there? What had been there before them? Some large villa standing in acres of grounds? Or simply fields? I went back to my old haunt, Paddington Recreation Ground, sat on a seat and ate my lunch and read a history of London in maps, which told me those houses owed their existence to First World War bombing. Zeppelins dropped a 660-pound bomb on Warrington Crescent in March 1918. It pulverized four houses and damaged a thousand others. I had had no idea. If I had ever thought about it, I had assumed aerial bombing was invented in 1939, before my parents were born. It amazed me to read that there were fifty-seven air raids on London between 1914 and 1918.

I read that and then I got down to The Seven Lamps of Architecture. That was my trouble, I’d read Ruskin and then a library book on domestic building, then Cherry and Pevsner’s London North-West; I’d alternate a Peter Ackroyd novel with Kent’s The Lost Treasures of London and then go straight into something about Pugin and the Palace of Westminster. There was no plan to it and, of course, no guidance, which is why my knowledge of architecture today is a muddle, a catalog of terms like “crocket” and “squinch” and “cantilever,” useless anecdotes and an abiding love of London houses. That’s one of the advantages of being an electrician, you get to go inside a lot of them.

Walking back to old Mrs. Fisherton’s I studied all those pathetic little posters people put up on lampposts asking if you’ve seen their cat Gismo or Benjy or Tara, a Blue Persian or an Abyssinian or a Silverpoint Siamese, who’s been missing for a day or a week or a fortnight. There were always several and I always looked at them and the sad little photographs on them. I was expecting to see a portrait and description of Mabel but there never was one and by then I was pretty sure there never would be. I was at the top of the iron staircase when a taxi pulled up and Selina got out of it. She came tripping up the path in her kitten-heel white shoes, her short white pleated skirt just brushing her knees, and looking as if about to take part in a women’s doubles match.

“Just back from your college, darling?”

I smiled.

“One of those redbrick places wants to give Max an honorary degree. What do you think of that?”

“It’s an honor, isn’t it?” I said.

“He’s turned it down, darling. Naturally. One must maintain one’s standards, he says. Polytechnics will be giving those things next.”