Kennington is where Lucas first encounters Edwina’s household after his parents’ separation, and where his father’s new family becomes part of a childhood divided between homes. The neighborhood is more than a destination: Lucas’s repeated crossings between Kennington and Chelsea make it a marker of competing parental claims, unfamiliar surroundings, and the loyalties he is expected to navigate.

Setting and First Arrival

Lucas reaches Kennington after dark with his father, who has been trying to clean up the blood left in the bathroom at Barbara’s home. A woman is waiting at the door of a tall brown house with railings. His father introduces her as Edwina; when she tries to hug Lucas, he gets away from her. The awkward greeting sets the tone for his entrance into a household that is not yet his own.

That night, Lucas sleeps beside his father in a strange wooden double bed that seems like a boat. In the morning, his father takes him back to Chelsea, where Aunty June has moved into River Walk. The swift return makes Kennington feel less like a settled home than one stop in a journey between households.

A Boundary Between Households

The first visit is not the last. Lucas’s father insists that he has the right to see his son, and the raised voices in the dining room register the conflict between him and Barbara. For the next eight years, Lucas has little control over where he is or whom he is with. He experiences both homes as difficult places to belong: at home with a mother he sees as crazy and sad, or with a step-family where his father longs for Edwina. School offers a different kind of discomfort, but at least its hostility is consistent.

The crossings between Chelsea and Kennington therefore carry a pressure beyond distance. Lucas is moved according to the claims and disputes of adults, and comes to feel out of context wherever he is. Kennington stands on one side of that divided childhood, connected to his father’s insistence on access and to the family Lucas has to enter without choosing it.

Lucas’s View of the Neighborhood

Lucas’s sense of Kennington is colored by Barbara’s contempt. She spits out the neighborhood’s name and asks who lives there; in her account, it consists entirely of council estates and bingo halls. Her view contrasts with the places Lucas has been brought up to know: the sloping green lawns of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. He keeps quiet about the Imperial War Museum, only a ten-minute stroll from the house, because praising it would feel disloyal to his mother.

The neighborhood is thus presented through competing descriptions rather than as a neutral backdrop. Barbara reduces it to a class-coded caricature, while Lucas privately notices a nearby place of interest but suppresses his response. Even his silence becomes part of the geography: speaking well of Kennington would mean crossing an emotional boundary as well as a river.

The Household at Kennington

At Edwina’s home, Lucas encounters her twins, Rowena and Charlie. He is almost a year older, but they show little interest in what he thinks or says. Rowena reads, while Charlie draws; their invented games leave Lucas feeling excluded, and Edwina’s laughter at his frustration makes him angry. These first impressions attach Kennington to the household’s existing intimacy, from which Lucas feels shut out. His difficulty is not simply reaching the house, but finding a place within the family already living there.