Hunt knew an amazing variety of people: intellectual immigrants from North London, Jewish communists from Brick Lane, gardeners from country houses, Irish builders, ex-boxers, and people vaguely associated with the entertainment industry. His centre of operations was an old house in Highbury New Park, which he claimed had been left to him by an old woman he met on a bench in Clissold Park. He still lives in it, alone with a shifting population of friends and lodgers. It took Kate years to realise that the spirit which dissolved and united the disparate elements of his particular melting pot was the spirit of homosexuality, for Hunt was not overtly what we would now call gay; he seemed to be interested in manipulation and domination for their own sake. He was a strange-looking man—tall, shambling, with dyed yellow hair, given to wearing shabby green or purple trousers and shapeless corduroy jackets. He collected people as well as articles, and he was not very nice to the items in his collection. Kate had never met anybody so rude, and wondered why anyone, including herself, put up with it. His pad, far from being a cosy refuge, was always seething with ill-will, with sullen or vocal disaffected acolytes, with emotional dramas, hurt feelings, double crossings, and double meanings. For some reason, she found this highly stimulating, and was prepared to endure a certain amount of abuse for the privilege of sitting on a dirty cushion in a corner listening to what was going on.

Hunt let her sit, keeping half an eye on her. He was of course more immediately interested in Danny, a roundfaced, rather plump, biddable young man, whom he mocked and tormented and instructed.

Kate has by now knocked around so much that she says she finds it hard to remember what a cultural shock the Highbury New Park scene was when she was first introduced to it at the age of sixteen. For one thing, the dirt, after the shiny satin surfaces and lustre vases of Amalfi Road, was quite a revelation. It was unlike the dirt of Arblay Street—it was antique, accumulated, deliberate. It gave her, she admits, a thrill. It was an act of rebellion to sit on such a cushion, to stare at such tattered curtains, to drink tea from so cracked a mug. She risked death at every sip, and the spirit of adventure was in her. She was also aware, she thinks, that she was in the presence of an organising aesthetic intention, despite the shabbiness; that she was being exposed to a fine range of valuable objects, the like of which she had never come across before. “It was almost as though I’d been put down in a shop of life styles, and told, ‘There they are, take your pick’ ’’—the greasy shiny red curtains, the plum-colored, dùsty-fringed, velour tablecloth, the threadbare Moroccan rug, the white cracked mugs, the skeleton clock, the grandfather clock, the Windsor chair, the bergère suite, the white deal table, the inlaid cabinet, the extraordinary dresser like a piece of church furniture, the medicine glasses, the stuffed squirrel, the heaps of copies of the Leathersellers’ Gazette, the games of solitaire, the rows of old riding boots, the ewer full of bottle tops, the jangling cow bells, the bead curtain, the plate inscribed A Gift from Southend, the skeleton fish. And amongst the people, which should she pick? Pale and languid Vic from Chatham, with his violet Vaseline eyelids and his winkle-picker shoes and his guitar? Butch, thick, hairy, squat Clifford, who travelled in Oriental fabrics? Loquacious little Abe Solomon, who worked backstage at the Unity Theatre? Lank, silent, vain Albert from the whelk stall? Runaway Geoffrey, with his white, large, unhealthy, shapeless face and damp black curls? Hunt’s court offered a fine variety of the seedy and the exotic, each member of which rated himself for mysterious undeveloped talents, for an unacknowledged secret stardom which Hunt alone had recognised, which Hunt alone could set in its rightful sphere. Sulkily, morosely, they suffered humiliation in exchange for recognition, in exchange for a returned image of hope and possibility: only Abe never sulked, he had the gift of the gab, he answered back, he put Hunt in his place, he was irrepressible.