All sorts passed through. Peace campaigners, patients, doctors, shaky people who'd had electric shock treatment. Sometimes Quentin Crisp came round, with blue hair, to play chess. Dust was piled up thickly in his flat across the road in Oakley Gardens.

Later, when it was the end of the 60s, the mothers drifted away and the place filled up with members of Rock bands. The Family, who recorded an instrumental named after the house, 93's OK J, and the lesser known Mighty Baby, who had been to India. They sat in their rooms, wearing their afghans and afros and snakeskin boots, and listening to Neil Young's Cinnamon Girl, or Frank Zappa's Peaches En Regalia, eating lychees. Rachel, who tolerated the rockers and took their rent - which was now up to £5 and £10 a week - but didn't socialize with them because she didn't understand them and was afraid of their drugs, ate bankrupt soup.

That was her name for it. It was what the kitchen always smelt of. It was an army-sized tureen of old vegetables and slightly off meat that she would just add to now and then, and reheat, until some mother or band member or other couldn't bear the smell any longer and would throw it away. But then, horribly, it would start up again.

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