When I was ten I thought my brother was God - he'd lie in bed and turn out the 

light with a fishing rod. I learned the names of all his football team, aid I 

still remembered them when I was nineteen.

Strange the things deal that I remember still - shouts from the playground when 

I was home and ill. My sister taught me all that she learned there; when we 

grow up, we said, we'd share a flat somewhere.

When I was seventeen, London meant Oxford Street.

Where I grow up there were no factories. there was a school and shops and some 

fields and trees, and rows of houses one by one appeared. I was born in one and 

lived there for eighteen years.

Then when I was nineteen. I thought the Humber would be the gateway from my 

little world into the real world. But there is no real world - we live side by 

side, and sometimes collide. .

When I was seventeen, London meant Oxford Street. It was a little world; I grew 

up in a little world.