A recent personal moment of Drabble resonance came when I read this article about a walk she took through Stoke-on-Trent.

Towards the end there is this paragraph:

There is, nevertheless, something perversely cosy and comforting about the long 19th-century terraces with their little workmen’s cottages. Walking from leafy Etruria Road down Victoria Street, across Shelton New Road and Stoke Old Road, you pass stretches of mean, jerry-built uniformity. The houses front the street, with no barrier of step or yard, and you can peer into the rooms through net curtains. Stretches of 19th-century terrace will suddenly erupt into strange and occasionally fantastic interludes of more recent date. Some of these homes are depressingly dingy, but some are well kept and inviting. The modest smallness of scale is in its way endearing.

I lived at 92 Victoria Street, between Etruria Road and Shelton New Road, until I was 18.

There ought to be a word in the literary-critical dictionary of terms for the sensation of reading an admired author’s description of a familiar building or landscape. In this case, and generally I assume, the sensation is a mixture of pleasure at the recognition (both reader’s and writer’s) and disappointment at the resort to cliché – ‘some are well kept and inviting’.

And even Homer nods: she seems to have missed the little wooden plaque screwed to the front of one of the houses at the Etruria Road end of Victoria Street recording the brief residence there of H G Wells. He was in the Potteries to pick up local, industrial, colour. He visited several factories, and certainly it was on this visit that he saw the blast furnace that he used in a horror story, ‘The Cone’.