AustLit

'I suppose I should be thankful, or pleased, or at least have some feeling of satisfaction, that my school sent me on those social-realist cross-country runs. It provided a group of feelings and sense impressions that I might otherwise have managed to avoid. I’m sure it never meant to; never meant, that is, the social-realist aspect, let alone socialist-realist. The runs themselves it meant. The runs, to me then, were further instruments of taming and torture, cruelties inflicted to show up my inabilities, inabilities I affected to despise until I did come to despise them, consider them not inabilities at all but evidence of my separateness from the bulk of people, the unpleasant mass from the bulk of boys I disliked and the attitudes I hated.' (Introduction)

'Returning to my home town again in my mind, preparatory to returning in my body, I find not unpredictably or indeed unexpectedly that I hold off. Is it that having explored it already, thought about it so much when I lived there and knew nowhere else, I have written all I would ever want to write, having recalled all I would ever want to record? Or is it that there are unrecorded but not unrecallable episodes, things I should yet look into? The old familiar tautening of the stomach muscles. But the stabs and jabs of pain, are they just the splinters from scraping the barrel and a sign it’s time to move on, but I have moved on, now I’ve moved back? Or are these the jabs of pain and tenderness of the as yet unrecorded episodes of trauma and angst and ill-repressed horror? Of course I could return looking for happy stories, comic stories, and then it would just be the pain of laughing.' (Introduction) 

'Down at my grandmother’s house, near the river, the gypsies came by and sold us pigeons’ eggs. I don’t remember if we ate them. Maybe we blew them, pricking a pinhole in each end and blowing out the white and the yolk and keeping the shell to start a collection. It was called Diglis down there, because the land used to belong to the cathedral, d’église, in the language of our Norman conquerors. But by the time my grandmother lived there, the land between the old Victorian houses and the river was used as a garbage tip to raise its level so it wouldn’t flood each year. And along the riverbank were huge petroleum storage tanks.' (Introduction)

'That there was an outside world of prostitutes and sex was brought to me mainly I suppose by people like Alastair. Ali and the other boarders had this air of sophistication – un-provincial I would call it now, but then there was no other world but the provincial to envisage. Ali told stories of an existence different from mine, but it never amounted to a whole way of life I could ever have imagined myself in. I didn’t doubt that existence, I could picture it, with Ali’s information, vividly. But it was a world I couldn’t see myself walking through. It was Ali’s world peopled by characters and mapped by landmarks with which he was wholly familiar and which I had never encountered and which I felt I never would.'  (Introduction)

'Back in England back in time, a memory theatre of growing up there, all the struggles and resistances after the new world sense of freedom, back to accent, class, place.' (Introduction)

'Membership of the Adam Lindsay Gordon Society was a step on the path of literary aspiration. We stayed back after school under the tutelage of the English master and read from our own work in a deserted classroom. But the invitation to the Shakespeare Reading Society was the mark of acceptance, reading from the works of Shakespeare on a Sunday evening in the Headmaster’s house. This was the entrée to the higher world of culture and French words. French windows, too, opening out onto the croquet lawn from the long, low Georgian house, the trace of medieval monastic ruins beyond the grass at one end, the stand of horse chestnut trees at the other, and the Headmaster intoning Hamlet, Prince Hal, Lear, Macbeth, Othello. This was as the world would be, privilege, exclusivity: and the girls from the private school over the wall brought in to read the few girls’ parts. Knees together on the long, low couch. The Headmaster opposite in his arm chair. We attendant lords from the sixth form on straight-backed, hard, auxiliary seating.' (Introduction)

'As soon as he saw the house, the father said the fir trees would have to be cut down. They were dying, going an ugly brown; and planted too close together, their sides rubbing against each other, they had no light or air. But they had to be cut down because they were unproductive; even if they had been all green and flourishing, they would have been condemned; their dying was an excuse, not a reason. And when, because of its view and its village, he bought the house, he said the first thing we’ve got to do is to get down those fir trees. Because they were taking up space and producing nothing. And they were taking the goodness out of the soil; and he could grow nothing next to them; and he couldn’t afford to waste land. And as they were dying, the son didn’t defend them.' (Introduction) 

'So I go to see my aunt to say goodbye again, she is ninety and this could be the last goodbye, my mother has been saying this for twenty years now, it might be the last time you see her, and it never is, but one time it will be, and she tells me the same stories again that I never listen to, having heard them so many times with deaf ears, refusing to listen to their insistent message.' (Introduction)

'The bed sitting room, the afternoon light streaming through the window, the high-backed easy chair, the dark furniture around the walls, the mementoes, photographs, pot plants, dried flowers, little objects. The little objects I cannot immediately recall. They meant a lot to my aunt, they were the memory theatre of her life, all with their associations. They took her out of the room through space and time. To me they represented the fetishism of objects, they were just clutter. I could afford to reject all that, or thought I could. At the time I felt I had no choice but to reject it, the oppressive weight of the old world, old values, which I had travelled so far to escape. But every time I revisited the objects would all be in place, in still, silent repose.'  (Introduction)   

'As the bus hurtled down the hill towards us at the stop he said, stepping from beneath the shelter to the edge of the pavement, waiting momentarily in the drizzle before climbing the steps of the as yet unstationary vehicle, ‘I’ve decided I’m not going to teach.’ It was – after seventeen years of being taught and the last few of intending teaching, to depart from the covering cap and furling gown and leap, as it were, onto the stream of, so to speak – a decision. A shuddering of the clutch and a chugging away, past the detacheds with their long drives and hedged fronts and gables and a sevenpenny bus ride; the privilege of suburbia has it tax.'  (Introduction)

'I remember that time travelling down on the Cathedrals Express in the middle of winter, my hands freezing as I tried to clear the windows of condensation to look at the white, still countryside. No heating was on. I’d sat as long as I could, hunched into my coat, the door of the compartment continually being opened and shut by people walking along the corridor and looking in, hoping for a warmer carriage, and then I heard a voice say it would be warmer nearer the engine. So I followed out into the corridor, pushing my way through people going in each direction, standing stamping their feet, curling their palms hopefully round cigarettes.' (Introduction) 

'When Bob and Helen moved into the house, Helen probably said something like, ‘How terrible to have such a big house for only two people.’ She would have meant nothing by it, would have felt no unease that in the village there were seven children to a bedroom, and here there were seven bedrooms to each of them, or something almost as ridiculous. She would have meant nothing by it except how wonderful it is to have a huge house; just as her father had used to say how terrible it was that his Jaguar did only twelve miles to the gallon. And at the same time she would have smiled secretly and knowingly to herself – something she had done even before she was pregnant – that soon there would not just be the two of them. Bob rather shambled. He was tall and quite broad-shouldered, but he would lower his head slightly as he walked, and his hair was repeatedly matted and ruffled. He was always running his hands through it in perplexity at some problem – at where to drink next, at how to explain a smashed rear light, at how to bandage a cut leg after falling over a concrete mixer outside a pub. The problem now was how to paint the house, with all its rooms, all grubby.' (Introduction)

'As I climbed the station steps to the platform, automatically I looked at the girls coming down, wearing their straw boaters and swinging their bulky satchels on their shoulders; automatically – because the age differential was now somewhat important, in one’s home town, automatically because it was the conditioned reflex of ten years’ growing up looking at the same girls on the cycle ride into school. I’d been looking at them that morning as I cycled into the station and when I became aware of it, I was surprised at my unconscious reaction. I hadn’t cycled down at that particular and reflex-promoting time for quite a while. It was a forgotten routine, and to be reminded of it in some way made up for cycling in the suit I’d pressed the night before.' (Introduction)

'The West Midland Underground goes from to . Or should I say went? Should I have said went? Should I be saying went? Or even will go. May go. Could go. Could have gone. Was to have gone. Is to go. Is to have gone. Is it possible to say is to have gone? Are there certain tenses that do not exist, may not, cannot, will not, did not; though now do? Perhaps the impossible tenses are needed for the impossible underground. Perhaps the hitherto impossible tense will bring into being the hitherto impossible West Midland Underground.' (Introduction)

'So, there we were, for the last time again, looking at the menu which I don’t think they had in the old days, I’m sure if there had been a menu I’d have written about it, about someone sitting there, fingering it, fiddling with it, turning it over and reading aloud from it, written that for something to begin with before getting going properly. We sat there down at the back, so we could see the whole length down to the glass front and open door, see people coming in and sitting sipping their coffees or cokes, and going out, and others coming. And three years ago, then it had been new; it had just been redecorated then, given a smooth sliding surface. They’d done that well; still it showed no marks of the time, no furrows of the years.'   (Introduction)