GAS STREET

For about a week, I started to hear this hissing, or rushing sound at nights and I seriously thought I was going off my head until the sound just suddenly stopped. Each time I heard it I would, like Lucy, get out of bed and investigate it, but I could never find what was causing the noise or where it was coming from. I've never heard it since, and I can only put it down to some psychological problem, probably caused by the fact that my husband had started being abusive towards me.

I was influenced by Fulham as the location of the book as I used to work in and around there for twenty-years, and drove home down Imperial Road every evening where I regularly saw those two yellow gasholders. I also worked on the site of the former Imperial Gasworks. By the 1990's, the few remaining buildings left on the site were rented out as office space, and I would work on their phone lines. The site was pretty rundown and derelict and there were still large old and rusting gas pipelines sneaking about that had long since been disused.

I also live next-door to the former Mitcham gasworks, and had to look at the disused gasholder from 1997 until it was dismantled a couple of years ago. Even though the gas works had closed and town gas had long since ceased to be manufactured (the UK swapped to natural gas, a by-product of North Sea oil drilling), the holder was still being used to store natural gas. It was filled up at nights and would make a rumbling sound similar to distant thunder, and I have Lucy mention this at the start of the book.

The character of Lucy is very much based on myself and my experiences of being the only woman working with three hundred-odd men, but I didn't make her a BT engineer. Unfortunately, you have to earn a lot of money to be able to afford to live in Fulham, even in the 1990's when the book starts, and believe me, we don't get paid that much. 

I decided to make her profession a bank trader, as for a brief time in the early 1990's we maintained dealer boards in the City, and I was frequently sent there to fault on them, so I saw first-hand the traders and the trading floors which are loud, physical, testosterone-fuelled environments and, once again, I would be the only woman working alongside a couple of hundred men. Lucy also suffers childhood abuse and works her way through college, as I did myself, and the interview scene very much mirrored my own including the derogatory questions and comments.

I based Wayne on someone I worked with back in the 1990's, the same individual who was the basis for Charlie Bateman in 'Lavender Fields'. He was a typical ballsy alpha-male but there was no sexual relationship between us and we were just good mates, so I've brought into play another ex of mine. 

The serial killer, Ernest Jones was primarily based on John Christie of 10 Rillington Place fame, but I've changed the location and the names, and he lives with his mother instead of his wife. As with all serial killers, Jones is a quiet, unassuming nobody who works as an office clerk by day but at nights he enjoys the pleasant past-time of luring woman back to Gas Street, murdering them and then burying their bodies about the house. The box-respirator gasmask that Jones wears when he murders his victims was an afterthought, as I have always thought it was particularly creepy and unnerving, with its large bug-eyes and the pipe projecting from the mouth, like a monster from a 1970's Dr Who episode.  

Lucy sees a psychiatrist because of the sightings of Jones, and I myself saw a therapist to help me through my abusive marriage, my ex-husband's arrest for domestic violence against me, and the bitter divorce and custody battle that followed for the next 5-years. He tried to get full-custody of our two children, plus half of my house and pension, so you can image the stress and the Hell I was going through, then add to that the fact that I'm a key-worker and had to go out and work throughout the whole of the Covid-19 lockdown. Well, after five horrific years for both me and the kids, and over twenty court appearances later, he failed dismally, and I was granted full custody without him being able to see them, and I was awarded a clean break divorce.

I was lucky in that I didn't have a complete breakdown as Lucy did, and I didn't have to spend any time in a psychiatric unit but I've used the whole therapist experience. This also links into why I think people see things that they don't, such as ghosts or experience paranormal activity. You have to believe in such phenomena before you actually see and feel anything, and that's just it, I do not believe in any of it. Sorry guys.

I have worked in many buildings over the years that I was told were haunted, but I never saw or heard anything. I did have what I would call a few 'weird' experiences, one in Notting Hill, one in a tithe barn down in Surry, and the other in Queen's Hospital in Croydon, the former Croydon workhouse. But, that's another story!

The ending of 'Gas Street' is slightly open ended, as I've left it up to the reader's own interpretation to make up their minds as to what is actually happening to Lucy.