Your name, Sir? The man introduced himself as Jerome...
It was in London. A young man in his mid-20s appeared in Marylebone. He had actually grown up in this neighbourhood but nobody could recognise a noisy schoolboy in that man wearing a wistful face, no matter the weather. He would usually choose Portland Place for a walk. For some reason, the wide street with an opening to Regent’s Park at its northern end seemed to be a wonderful place to stroll looking around and making notes in the notebook.
The police noticed the man would mostly show up in the evenings, when it was already dark, serious and dreamy at the same time. They had never seen him doing anything against the law, but the whole situation looked suspicious enough for the policemen to finally break the silence,
"Your name, Sir?"
Modern view on the southern end of Portland Place. ©Image by Feeling My Age from UK, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
The man introduced himself as Jerome and explained he was working on a book. The book was to tell about his own life, and he simply preferred wandering along the dark streets for inspiration rather than staying in his tiny flat. Nobody knows whether the inspectors believed the man that evening, but Jerome had nothing to hide and would continue to visit the Marylebone neighbourhood on a regular basis for inspiration.
It did not take long before he got to know all inspectors who would ever patrol the area and before each of the inspectors could recognise Jerome from the back. Caution transformed into friendliness, friendliness into curiosity, and Jerome found a way to make a good use of these acquaintances: he considered the inspectors his first audience. He read them some passages and tested the reaction. And there was no happier man in the world than Jerome who was coming back home knowing that he had made the strictest inspector genuinely laugh at his stories...
That’s how Jerome K. Jerome’s first book On the Stage – and Off was born. The book (though neither immediately accepted nor a future bestseller) appeared successful enough and Jerome was then able to purchase an old bureau, the one he would use as his desk till the end of his life.