Cricklewood and Coren, a beautiful friendship

I had just left Kensington, the village of my childhood, for distant Wimbledon. "Is that wise?" he asked. "Necessary, but not wise," was the gist of my response and he then told me that he too might have to move, saying with lugubrious melancholy: "My wife wants to live in Knightsbridge." To the question "Where are you now?" he answered "Cricklewood."

A joke, I thought; so eminent a man could not possibly live in this mocked corner of north-west London, this nowhere between Kilburn and Colindale. I did not know that it had been his lifelong habitat, that he had written half-adozen books on it, and that he felt for it the same acute sense of belonging that the Mole felt in The Wind and the Willows for his Dulce Domum.

What did I know of Cricklewood to be so uppity? I went to a school in Hampstead of which one wall formed the border with a Cricklewood council estate from which rude boys emerged to mock us for our straw boaters, and access to the school was primarily from the bus and trolleybus routes that intersected at Cricklewood Broadway. Thus it was in the 1940s that Cricklewood was on my map.

It was then a nesting-place for European Jews and Issy Bonn, a Yiddish humorist on the BBC's Home Service, dubbed it Cricklevitch and adopted the persona of kosher shopkeeper. It had a dance hall that seemed to function every hour of the day and we schoolboys in short trousers, prurient, speculated over the conjugation of spivs and black GIs and blonde factory girls who lay in wait outside. The marshalling yards of the old Midland Railway attracted the Luftwaffe to Cricklewood, and we collected shrapnel on the way to school.

Alan missed all that; seven years my junior he must have known a better and brighter Cricklewood, less seedy, sordid and industrial, and he lived there for so long that there should be a blue plaque on his old house. He left it, not for Knightsbridge, but for Regent's Park. Can anyone still in Cricklewood be as fond of it as was he?