Tropic of Ruislip by Leslie Thomas

One of the side-effects of writing a novel set in the 1970s is the occasional digression into material published at the time with an eye to catching the decade’s zeitgeist. I have previously found myself dissecting Tom Sharpe’s Wilt and recently dug out this novel from around the same period. The historical insight has been considerable. As has the growing conviction that the past really is another country...

More a loose set of vignettes than a structured novel, focused on a set of young families and their infidelities, snobberies and prejudices, Tropic of Ruislip follows the lives and loves of the better-heeled sort in Plummers Park, a new, flat-roofed executive estate outside Watford, on the right side of the Bakerloo Line.

The social highlight of the estate seems to be to a party at someone else’s house, where they get drunk and dance mournfully to Frank Sinatra. A bash at the Minnings’ involves the usual fumblings with other people’s spouses when Sinatra’s Songs for Swinging Lovers is put onto the record player, and everyone is getting tight:

People were bending this way and that, rolling and staggering too, with the dubious red and white wine that the Minnings provided, plus a bottle of scotch passed secretly around after being burgled from a locked cupboard.

Still, the evening isn’t without event. Susie Minning’s errant husband Doug appears with his West Indian girlfriend and her mates and the two groups eye each other suspiciously across the lounge carpet. It takes intervention from the Minnings’ revolting offspring to thaw things out when they appear with a tray of glasses:

...the little Minnings children appeared, charmingly bearing trays of small glasses filled with green liquid. “My God, they’ve found the crème de menthe,” shouted someone, and hands, black and white, came from all sides to grab the glasses, some to be sipped, but some, in that charged and alcoholic atmosphere, to be brazenly swallowed at a gulp. Screams and cries and bubbles followed immediately. People staggered for the kitchen, the bathroom and the toilet, or made for the open air, while clouds of bubbles great and small bounced and danced and squirted about the room. “Don’t drink it!” screamed Susie. “The little bastards! It’s Fairy Liquid!”

Finishing this book, I thought to myself that they don’t write fiction like this anymore. I can’t say that’s entirely a bad thing either.

Spilling The Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright

I first came across Clarissa Dickson Wright as one half of the cookery show Two Fat Ladies, but she has led a far more diverse life than that. She was the youngest woman ever to be called the bar and she is now a campaigner for the British countryside. Her appearance here, however, is because a long period of her life was lost to alcohol; an entry to be filed under ‘the perils’.


Until she finally sought help and found sobriety through the AA, Clarissa Dickson Wright put away a formidable amount of drink and managed to squander a generous inheritance along with a highly promising career in law. Her first encounter with strong drink, as a child in Singapore, is described with poignancy:

On the dining room sideboard stood a decanter of bright green liquid which when I tried it had a delicious peppermint taste; it was of course crème de menthe and my first taste of alcohol. Every day I took just a little which made me feel happy and dreamy...

However, it was the deaths of her mother and her beloved Clive that sent her over the edge into a decade of oblivion, which left her homeless, broke and missing several years of her life to a black void.

I asked for a large whiskey, poured myself four fingers and as I gulped it down the white light faded. Here, I suddenly realised, was the answer to everything, the key to the universe, the abatement of pain.

The writing in Spilling the Beans is tremendous, as well as painfully honest. It’s a great read that finishes on a happy note: Clarissa Dickson Wright is today happy, sober and something of a British institution. It also contains a note of caution, which I feel I must end with:

All great fun but let me give you an indication of what drink does in excess. For the start of the eighties we had a party, to which thirty people came: of those thirty ten are dead, ten are in recovery and where the others are I do not know.