Oxford street

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 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.