Books > The Finishing Touches

Funnily enough, the inspiration for The Finishing Touches came to me all in one day, but in rather different parts of London. I was in Islington one Saturday morning, looking for a christening gift in a tiny silverware shop in the antiques quarter, when I came across the strangest bits and pieces of Victorian silverware. I had rather an old-fashioned nanny when I was little, so I knew my way around hinged leaf tea strainers and lemon squeezers, but I'd never seen some of the oddities here. I got chatting to the friendly owner, and her adorable Westie (just like Braveheart!), and she explained that these were sardine forks, and those were asparagus tongs, and that was a special strawberry sugaring set... I suddenly had a vivid mental image of how upper crust girls, years ago, must have sat in finishing school classes learning how to wield these mysterious implements - and how bored society ladies must have been, having to make those teas stretch out to fill a whole afternoon, with ever more complicated rituals designed to catch out the uninitiated. It was a genteel game that had been played all over the Empire, but now the silver pieces were here, dusty and unrecognized, and somewhat useless. But once, they’d been absolutely essential to a lady’s social skills… I bought Isabella, my niece, some silver teaspoons – I love looking up the hallmarks on the back and wondering where they’ve been since 1935, and how they got to London from Sheffield - and then hopped on the bus back down into town. As the bus meandered down through the City streets of Clerkenwell and Holborn, towards Leicester Square, the etiquette girls stayed with me in the back of my mind, as my eye drifted past the old buildings where grey pigeons perched on iron balconies and all London’s jumbled history crammed up together. London buses are a godsend for nosy writers looking for stories. I can spend hours just going round and round town, sitting on the top deck and looking at the detailed, half-forgotten architecture you miss at street level. I must confess, I'm a nosy parker, and like peering in the windows too, especially those offices which, not so long ago, must have been rather grand central London residences owned by the sort of families whose daughters would certainly have been finished, either here or in Switzerland. So, by now, the 19 bus had diverted through Bloomsbury, which has elegant Georgian houses with wide front doors and large windows. We stopped for traffic next to some offices, and I got a good look into the floor level with my window. Although the room behind was full of grey computers and desks, I could see a gorgeous gilded ceiling rose, from which a spectacular crystal chandelier must once have hung. It was exactly the sort of grand room that used to be a ballroom and my imagination made a connection between the girls and the house - wouldn't that have been a marvellous place to learn how to pour tea and wield a pair of grape scissors, beneath gilded plaster grapes? What if one of these houses had once been a finishing school? As the bus chugged towards Oxford Street, the girls started to take shape in my mind – the rebel, the bored princess, the confused country deb. But the more I thought about it, Bloomsbury wouldn't quite have been the right place for a finishing school. It's always been an arty area of London, where many writers and bohemian artists lived, but it's never had quite the impeccable social cachet of my last stop that day - Mayfair. Mayfair is my favourite area of London. Turn the corner off bustling, black-cab-lined Piccadilly into the tall townhouses of the side streets and there's an instant hush: you half-expect Berkeley Square to fade into black and white, it's so elegant and old-fashioned. Discreet hotels serve afternoon tea next to gilded Victorian pubs serving after-work pints, and opposite Green Park, there’s an abandoned Underground station, Down Street. In my imagination, the dashing GIs and debs in fox-fur stoles are still sitting out the Blitz, throwing back martinis and cracking brave jokes as an old gramophone crackles with swing music. That's more the area that an enterprising, perhaps widowed, gentlewoman would found a finishing school, near the gentlemen's clubs of St James, and the exclusive boutiques of Bond Street. It's also the place an aristocrat might house a shady mistress, or a deposed Empress might choose to make her home in exile, high up in one of the seven-storey townhouses overlooking Hyde Park and the Serpentine. I strolled around the back streets, spotting tucked-away mews cottages and garage doors that once housed Bentleys, and before that, gleaming horses and carriages, relishing the strange fairytale atmosphere that manages to be both magical and very real-life London at the same time. Between Piccadilly and Park Lane is the sort of place you might find a baby on a doorstep or a timewarp ladies' academy. I started taking pictures of the houses on my phone and the germ of the idea started to take root...