AL Kennedy: ‘Being out of London is the new being in London’

The Scottish writer on the polluted capital, her lifelong love of the stage and finding serendipity in Wivenhoe

AL Kennedy is moving again. Back in 2012, sick of spending half her life schlepping up and down the country on a train, she succumbed to the capital’s gravitational pull and made the journey south from Glasgow to London. With no fixed idea about where she wanted to end up, she drew a ring around the city’s “hysterically expensive” centre and began to explore the areas at its edges. Eventually, she discovered Lewisham’s Telegraph Hill: an unshowy, bedded-in neighbourhood of solidly handsome houses, set foursquare around a small, steep park stocked with trees that are mature and beautiful. “It’s lovely,” Kennedy says. “It’s the best place to live in London.” We meet in a pub at the bottom of the Hill. “Beautiful streets, nice folk, proper community,” she says, between cautious sips of tea. “People smile at each other and have conversations.” But even so, she is packing up; leaving for the picturesque estuary town of Wivenhoe, in Essex. The city has proved too much for her. “The pollution is kind of killing me,” she admits, with a sigh that segues into a raw cough. “I’m on triple-dose antihistamines just so I can breathe. It didn’t used to be this extreme: before I moved I’d stay here for weeks at a time and be able to see and everything. It’s got really bad since I arrived, basically. I’m trying not to take it personally.”

Frankly, it is a low blow for the capital to have dealt, given that she has spent her four years here writing a novel about it. Her characters, though, would most probably view it as all of a piece with a city in which the pollution has come to feel like the visceral emanation of a place gone sour; a place where money rules, competition is a religion, and poverty or disability of any kind rule you out of the game. Serious Sweet is the story of Jon, a career civil servant whose disenchantment with the government’s ruthless social policies is slowly corroding him, and Meg, a recovering alcoholic living in (of course) Telegraph Hill, who come into contact with each other when Jon sets up a letter-writing service in a bid to ease his loneliness, to which Meg, in her loneliness, subscribes. The novel is at heart a love story, but one that is as warped and wretched as it is tender. The parallel Kennedy draws between her broken, brutalised characters and the city they are fighting to survive in is a vivid one, and not at all complimentary – but nor is it entirely without hope.

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