Bearing in mind that it is very unlikely that Jane or Paul will ever talk about their relationship (they don't have to, since it's their privacy). I had the idea, seeing how uninformed many fans are despite having a lot of information at hand, to ma...
PAUL:For a young guy who likes his home comforts, boy, did she spoil me! She's a real great lady, who liked to cook, who liked to fuss over someone. And I'm not averse to a bit of that! If someone says, "D'you want some breakfast?" I'm not going to say, "No, I'm cool, I'll get my own."
Barry Miles:Margaret Asher took him in, mothered him and made him very much one of the family.
PAUL:Margaret and I got on very well. She sort of mothered me. It was what I'd been used to before my mum died, when I was 14, though I'd never seen a family quite like this.
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Barry Miles:Paul found himself in what was essentially an English upper-class household, albeit a rather artistic and eccentric one. He was fascinated.
PAUL:It was really like culture shock in the way they ran their lives, because the doctor obviously had a quite tight diary, but all of them ran it that way. They would do things that I'd never seen before, like at dinner there would be word games. Now I'm bright enough, but mine is an intuitive brightness. I could just about keep up with that and I could always say, 'I don't know that word.' I was always honest. In fact, I was able to enjoy and take part fully in their thing.
Barry Miles:Dinner conversation would veer from a discussion of the date the tomato was introducedto England - a fierce argument between Peter and his father solved by reference to an encyclopedia - to Dr Asher reaching across the table and signing his name on a sheet of paper upside down ('Bet you can't do that!') and explaining that he had taught himself to write upside down in order to save time when nurses presented papers for his signature.
Wimpole Street and Harley Street, which runs parallel, were streets of elegant town houses built in the eighteenth century by the earls of Oxford for gentlemen and their families on what was then the outskirts of London. The essayist Edmund Burke took up residence there in 1757 and it became an area of fashionable portrait painters, Royal Academicians and military men. Later, in 1891, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was set in nearby Baker Street, lived at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, but Wimpole Street is best known for the poet Elizabeth Barrett, who lived at number 50. During the years she lived there she rarely left the house of her tyrannical father Edward, who was neurotically determined that none of his eleven children should fall in love or marry. However, on 12 September 1846, when Elizabeth was forty, the poet Robert Browning 'pulled her up from her invalid's couch' and they were secretly married at nearby Marylebone church. Elopement to Italy followed a week later and they lived there happily ever after. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's house no longer stands, but most of the 1750s buildings in the street remain, including number 57 where the Ashers lived.
