Heppenstall, Orwell and the Irish poet Michael Sayers shared a flat in Lawford Road, Camden.
Friendship was restored, but after Orwell's death, Heppenstall wrote an account of the incident called The Shooting-Stick.
[10] During World War II he was in the British Army, but with a Pay Corps posting at Reading, close enough to remain in touch with literary Fitzrovia.
[1] He listed Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, and Vladimir Nabokov as the writers he most admired.
He is sometimes therefore grouped with Alain Robbe-Grillet, or associated with other British experimentalists: Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Stefan Themerson and Eva Figes.
During this time he took a strong dislike to his working-class neighbours and began deliberately lighting bonfires in order to antagonise them.
[19][20] Heppenstall's final novel, The Pier, depicts a writer resembling himself murdering a similar family living next door to him.