AustLit

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)