Therapy

in your head, and then the electric motor whined and ticked under the floor as the driver switched on the power. The train moved off with a jerk and rumbled over Hungerford Bridge, the Thames glittering in the sun through the trelliswork of girders; then lurched through the points between Waterloo East and London Bridge. From there the line is straight for miles, and the train rushed at rooftop level past workshops and warehouses and lock-up garages and scrap-merchants’ yards and school playgrounds and streets of terraced houses, overlooked by the occasional tower block of council flats. It was never a scenic route.
    It was years since I last travelled along this line, and decades since I alighted at Hatchford. In 1962 Dad had a bit of luck — the only bit of luck he had in his life, actually, apart from meeting Mum: £ 20,000 on the pools, Littlewoods’ Three Draws. That was a lot of money in those days, enough for him to retire early from London Transport and buy a little bungalow at Middleton-on-Sea, near Bognor. After he and Mum moved there, I never had any need or inclination to return to Hatchford. It was eerie going back today, a dreamlike mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar. At first I was struck by how little had changed around the Five Ways. There are different shopfronts and a new road layout — the florist’s on the corner has turned into a video rental shop, the Co-op bakery is a DIY superstore, and the road is marked like a complicated board-game, with arrows and cross-hatching and mini-roundabouts — but the contours of the streets and buildings are essentially as I remember them. The sociology of the place has changed though. The little streets of terraced houses off the main road are now largely occupied by Caribbean and Asian families, as I discovered when I went to have a look at our old house in Albert Street.
    The sash widows had been ripped out and replaced with sealed aluminium units, and a small glazed porch had been stuck over the front door, but otherwise it was the same house, greyish-yellowish brick, with a slate roof and a front garden a yard deep. There’s still a big chip out of the stone window ledge at the front, where a piece of shrapnel hit it in the war. I knocked on the door and a grey-haired Caribbean man opened it a suspicious crack. I explained that I had once lived there and asked if I could come in and look around for a moment. He looked doubtful, as if he suspected me of being a snooper or a con-man, as well he might; but a young woman, who addressed him as Dad, appeared at his shoulder, wiping her hands on an apron, and kindly invited me to step in. What struck me first, apart from the spicy cooking smells lingering on the air, was the narrowness and darkness of the hall and staircase when the front door was closed: I’d forgotten the absence of light inside a terraced house. But the wall between the front and back parlours had been knocked down to make a bright and pleasantly proportioned living-room. Why hadn’t we done that? We spent most of our lives crammed into the back room, where it was hardly possible to move without banging into each other or the furniture. The answer, of course, was the ingrained habit of always keeping something — whether it was a suit, a tea-service, or a room — “for best”.
    The extended living-room was cheerfully if gaudily decorated in yellows and purples and greens. The TV was on, and two small children, twin girls aged about three, were sitting on the floor in front of it, sucking their thumbs and watching a cartoon programme. The two fireplaces had been boarded up and the mantelpieces ripped out, and there were central-heating radiators under the front and rear windows. The room bore so little resemblance to what I remembered that I was unable to populate it with memories. I peered out at the small patch of ground we used to dignify with the name, “back garden”. It had been largely paved over and partly covered by a lean-to extension of transparent fibreglass. There was a bright red barbecue on wheels, and a carousel for drying washing instead of the sagging rope that used to run diagonally from end to end, propped up by a cleft stick. The young woman told me her husband drove a Routemaster bus, and I seized gratefully on this thread of continuity with the past. “My Dad used to drive a tram,” I told her. But I had to explain what a tram was. They didn’t offer to show me the bedrooms, and I didn’t ask. I