The Donleavy family lived at no 40a Broughton Road. My pal, the brooding and gangly Philip, was the son of emerging author and playwrite J.P. Donleavy whose first successful novel  “The Ginger Man” was performed to much acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea. 

During visits to the Donleavy home I often glimsed the bearded writer in his lamplit study off the upstairs landing, tapping away on his typewriter, sheets of screwed up A4 paper filling the wicker basket by his desk.  Donleavy was rather an awsome character with that beard and a penetrating stare which seem to bore into one. He and his family had moved into a very different Fulham of the 1950s to the present day one of professional upwardly mobile individuals, high cost luxury housing and fashionable shops and bistros.

In an autobiography* published in 1986 Donleavy draws this rather unflattering picture of the area;

"But now settled in England I was far away from Ireland as you could be, down a working class Fulham street where nary any soul thinking of the betterment of his social position and future, would dare to venture."

He continues; "One Christmas Day, holed up down my grim street where instead of fresh westerly winds from the Wicklow Mountains I had the tall chimneys of the Fulham Power Station looming, unleashing their clouds of smoke."

"A young British elitist, son of an Oxford don, once walking with me through Kensington suddenly stopped in his tracks. "I'm awfully sorry, my dear chap, but I cannot proceed father, you see we are about to enter the borough of Fulham and I never walk there."

 

(Right) J.P. Donleavy pictured in 1993. Courtesy Daily Express

The author's first wife Valerie Donleavy was an attractive, tall and willowy woman. She had long black hair often tied up in a bow. I have a clear recollection of her, listening to her favourite “Archers” on the radio as she cooked in the kitchen, with her little 'mousy' daughter Karen standing beside her.

The Donleavys invited me to stay with them at their idyllic cottage at Maughold on the Isle of Man. I was just ten when my mother put me on an aeroplane at Heathrow to be collected by the great man himself at Ronaldsway. It was my first experience of air travel and it was a memorable rural holiday on a beautiful island.

*J.P. Donleavy's Ireland-In All Her Sins And In Some Of Her Graces. Published in 1986 Viking Penguin Inc

See also Broughton Road section for Valerie Donleavy's own memories of Sands End.