Your book Heads and Straights is part of the “Penguin Lines” series, which celebrates the 150th anniversary of the London Underground. Why did you choose the Circle Line?
I was floored when Penguin asked me to write about the Tube but I knew I had to do it. When I thought about the various lines, I realised the only one I knew anything about was the Circle Line, because I’d been brought up near it. I also liked the metaphor, the paradox, of the circle and the line.
There were a number of key events in the life of my family, in my grandmother’s life in particular, that had happened near Circle Line stops. One of my sisters, when she found out about the project, said: “Of course, that’s the posh line.” And immediately there were alarm bells going off in my head, because I’d very carefully managed to elude questions of class in my writing.
You’ve lived in France for over 25 years. Is class handled differently there?
It still feels to me, every time I come back to Britain, that class is this great, open wound that nobody can leave alone – and, in a way, that it isn’t in France. In this country, class provides endless fodder for television programmes and newspaper articles; you don’t get that in France.
You write about returning to the King’s Road, where you grew up, and finding it terribly homogeneous. The French like to congratulate themselves for avoiding the worst of globalisation, don’t they?
They do. Though Paris hasn’t avoided becoming a museum. And Paris has a homogeneity of its own, doesn’t it? It has done since [the renovation of the city by Georges-Eugène] Haussmann in the mid-19th century. But yes, France has definitely avoided the homogeneity of unbridled capitalism.
How would you describe your relationship with London now?
There were two opportunities that were offered to me by this book: one was to look back at my relationship with Britain and London in particular; the other was to look at my relationship with family. In both cases, it became clear to me that I’d been running away from them for a long time.
Your grandmother sounds remarkable – she met Virginia Woolf when she was a child.
I’ve searched high and low in Woolf’s letters for any mention of Gran! The thing you have to remember about my grandmother is that she had a very loose relationship with the truth. So she could have made it up. I like to think she didn’t but she may well have.
My mother always warned my sisters and I to be careful in our understanding of what Gran told us about her life. I think the gap between my grandmother’s loquacity about her life and the restraint and silence of my mother is partly what made me – as a child and an adolescent – very eager to know the truth, to dig for psychological explanations.
It made you a writer, in other words?
Yes.
You organise the book around the distinction between “heads” and “straights”. The interesting thing about this distinction is that it’s not generational.
Not only does it slice across generations, it slices across class. I think that was the usefulness of it as a label for my rebellious sisters in the early 1970s – they could elude the distinctions of class by categorising people in that way.
Your parents, by contrast, were straights, weren’t they?
They were. They were definitely straights. My father liked to live dangerously but I think it was very important for us to believe he was a straight – but actually, with hindsight, I’m not sure he was.
A lot of people of their generation woke up to the excitement of the 1960s, belatedly, in the 1970s. They were clawing to recapture a touch of experimentation and excess. My parents were definitely in that category. But then, suddenly, it was too late – suddenly, you were looking at Thatcher and the party was over.
Lucy Wadham’s “Heads and Straights” is published by Particular Books (£4.99)
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