ABSTRACT
My mother never let anybody forget that she was a Londoner but, in the habit of the period, would elasticate the exact location of her family home according to whom she was talking to: in fact, when I have passed through her street decades later, it does not have quite the grim overtones that I dimly remember from the occasional visits that we would make from Ipswich or Colchester, through the mists of Essex and towards Wood Green. What do still seem depressing are the nearby streets of what is now Haringey, which still appear to have the frowsy, downbeat air that was my childhood vision of London. This lasted right up to the time of our group visits from the Bournemouth college to the AA Show, in which the detachedness of the Bedford Square world was still not really London but a kind of dream, drawn on pieces of paper, seen on the walls of an elegant Georgian house. So my sudden precipitation into that same school, with about 10 days’ notice in February 1958, also seemed slightly unreal (see p 66).
