ABSTRACT
I didn’t go to London alone. Pete Callaghan, whose companionship dated from St Edmund’s, had also got into the same course, at University College – or UC, as we learned to call it – and so we took the same train down to Euston, and found our way to the same digs which the university lodgings officer had assured us were ‘quite close to college’. UC is in Gower Street, in central London. The digs were in Finchley, which seemed to be seriously close to Scotland. This was obviously some special London sense of the word ‘close’. We endured the hour-long journeys into college for a term, then found ourselves a place nearer in, along with some other students, in Tufnell Park. My three years in London were spent there and in nearby Finsbury Park. Always bedsits. Residential university accommodation was virtually non-existent in London in those days, and is still pretty thin. Having since seen the intimacy of an academic life where you live on campus or in college, I’m sorry I never had the chance to experience it for myself. On the other hand, living out in the London suburbs did provide a chance to get to know the city well. And we took it. Each weekend we would choose a tube station, go to it, then try to find our way back to the city centre on foot. As a result, I still feel very much at home in London, and know parts of it as well as I know anywhere.
