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.