...we live side by side---and sometimes collide.

everything but the girl

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, and I still remembered them when I was nineteen.

Strange the things 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 grew up, we said, we'd share a flat somewhere.

When I was seventeen, London meant Oxford Street.

Where I grew 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.
ebtg