The Go-Away Bird

There is no plaque yet on No 13 Baldwin Crescent, otherwise known as ‘Dunedin’. There ought to be. For on the top floor of this shabby yellow-brick house, hidden away between the Camberwell New Road and gloomy Myatt’s Fields, Muriel Spark wrote most of the four or five novels for which we’ll remember her. She was as happy in leafy, run-down Baldwin Crescent as she ever had been or was to be in her long, tense, proud, unforgiving life. She did, it is true, make an excursion to her childhood Edinburgh home to re-immerse herself in the speech of Morningside while she wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in four weeks. But all her other masterpieces — Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors and much of The Girls of Slender Means — were written within a glorious period of only five years in her two attic rooms in Camberwell.