Ruth Fainlight’s life in verse

Sitting at the kitchen table, Ruth Fainlight looks out of the window to the street below. “The most startling thing to me is that, after all this time, I’m still here,” says the 93-year-old poet.

Fainlight has lived in her flat on the second floor of a mansion block in west London for nearly 55 years, ever since she and her late husband, the writer Alan Sillitoe, moved here in 1970. The afternoon light falls across the wooden table, piles of newspapers and copies of The New Yorker, a…