The Friends Forever Collection

I was a bit puzzled by this as I had once read how Harriet Chance liked to sit at her kitchen table and write her first draft by hand, surrounded by her four cats. Surely cats would distract her? The lady who lives downstairs from us has a cat called Biddy, and when she comes to visit us, Biddy I mean, she always spreads herself out across my homework, if I’m doing homework, and starts grooming herself or purring. I find that very distracting!

I told this to Harriet. “Sometimes,” I said, “she even tries to chew the paper!”

“Oh, I couldn’t be doing with that,” said Harriet. “I couldn’t write with cats around! And I couldn’t write on paper … far too slow!”

Falteringly, I said, “I read this interview where you said how you always did your first draft by hand … you said you couldn’t write straight on to a computer.”

“Did I?” She laughed. “Well, I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century! One has to move with the times.”

“I still write by hand,” I said.

“That’s only ’cos you don’t have a computer,” said Annie.

“They are one of the blessings of modern technology,” said Harriet. “Imagine! If I didn’t have a computer, we would never have met. Now, then! How about some tea? Annie, clear a space on the table while I go and get it.”

I needed to go to the loo – I always do after a car journey. Harriet told me the bathroom was “directly ahead, up the stairs … but be warned, it’s a bit primitive!”

It was such a funny little place, the bathroom. Like a little cell. All it had was a washbasin and a toilet, with a cracked bit of mirror on the wall. Both the washbasin and the toilet were very old-fashioned. The washbasin was propped up on a sort of iron stand, and the toilet had a broken seat and a long chain with a handle that you had to pull when you’d finished, except that it didn’t seem to work, which was rather embarrassing. Red-faced, I told Harriet about it, and she said, “Oh, dear! Never mind. At least it’s better than having to go outside … imagine that on a dark night!”

“You could write a book about someone living in a place like this,” said Annie. “You could call it Spooky Cottage.