MemoirLondon in the 1970s was awash with new-fangled forms of dissent and libertarian ideas. It was an animated and exciting place to live, especially if you immersed yourself in the free-thinking enterprises of the day.
Michèle Roberts, a recent graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, comes to London in September 1970 and installs herself in an attic bedsit on the northern edge of Regent's Park, within earshot of animal noises from the zoo. That is thrilling enough, but other noises will soon drown out the lions' roar: the noise of protest, of street theatre, of women shouting for their just desserts. It's enough to go to anyone's head.
Roberts is both an active participant in almost every form of topical revolt, and an inspired and dedicated observer, slightly detached from all the colourful ebullience around her. Flâneur is the word she uses: a stroller, a loiterer-with-intent, a recorder of urban goings-on.
Paper Houses (a snappy title) draws on diaries and notebooks the future novelist and poet kept at the time, and also on remembered impressions. It sketches in the author's conservative background ("conservative" with both a large and a small "c"): English father, French mother, convent education - even, God help us, a religious vocation - until Somerville disabused her of that anomalous ambition. (A fascination with nuns and religious systems remained, however.)
During her first two years in London she holds the post of Library Scholar in the Printed Books department of the British Museum, obtaining a qualification which leads to her appointment as British Council librarian in Bangkok.
The Bangkok residency makes a vivid interlude, but the nerve centre of this book is London itself, its different weathers, actual and psychic, its scope for adventures, lesbian, heterosexual or ideological, its diverse localities. Nine of Michèle Roberts's 12 chapters are called after London districts: Camberwell, Peckham Rye, Notting Hill Gate. Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone expressed more delight in the sparkle and quirkiness of London streets. "The houses reared up adorned with columned porches, tiled steps, Dutch-style pediments. The facades were painted in sweet-pea pastels: dusty pink, pale blue, lemon; and in smart dark shades of navy, fir green, scarlet . . . Early-nineteenth-century cottages hid in the narrow backstreets around Pottery Lane."
IN THE MIDST of all this, Roberts herself is something of a bird of passage, flitting from one distinctive quarter to another, an occupier of rented rooms, an expert in communal living. A brief first marriage takes her to Italy, and then to Cambridge, Massachusetts. When she finally realises her ambition to own a house, it's in the Mayenne, in France. But London with its idiosyncrasies has struck deep. It's the setting for a good many projects and pungent experiences. It aids the suppression of what the author calls "the Mother Superior in the head", the residue of a Catholic upbringing, constantly ticking her off for being insufficiently docile. But dashing new credos by now have supervened: church teaching never stands a chance against "Art in Revolution" exhibitions and bravura feminist burlesque. Merry times. "There was always a party somewhere," Roberts says.
PARTIES AND POLITICS and friendships: it makes an exhilarating mix. The book contains many affectionate and lucid portrayals of friends and lovers (though not of family members). It's not all fun and bold countercultural assertion, however. There are low moments. To make ends meet, the author is forced to take a good many stop-gap jobs - cook, teacher, poetry editor for Spare Rib - while getting on with her proper occupation, writing. Once, employed as a pregnancy tester, she succumbs to depression and sheds some tears into someone's urine sample, wrecking it.
The "paper houses" of her title stand for her somewhat rootless existence - while friends around her are getting settled in one way or another - but also, crucially, for the permanent form her perceptions acquire, in fiction.
Paper Houses is a testimony to her perceptiveness and descriptive powers (though someone should have saved her from the gaffe on page 109 when she refers to "the Stalky and Co series by Dornford Yates").
It's a marvellous evocation of a particular time and place.
Patricia Craig is a critic, biographer and anthologist. Asking for Trouble, her memoir of Belfast and Donegal, will be published by Blackstaff in the autumn
Paper Houses: A Memoir of the '70s and Beyond By Michèle Roberts Virago, 337pp. £16.99