jeff

I disliked the city where I grew up, but remember it fondly. I left to boarding school at twelve, which felt like leaving both the city and home, so perhaps it was not actually the city I grew up in, as much as the city up I grew up from - upon leaving. London thus became and remains - tunneled by points and lines from hall to hallowed garden, the bedroom stairs to the museum grate - a cherished mine of my own worlds; smelling small and mostly secret.

It might be that it's only British childhood that's such a colonisation; but I remember carving out and claiming my own fields and church-yards, roofs and tree-tops, and mapping them on a pulsing mental map. Behind every terraced house is a mostly disused garden. There are railway cuttings and tube tunnels; parks glistering at night, locked in with the longest untrod grass, and on certain spring days, happy as the leaves are normal in their light. Reaches of grass. There's an abandoned Chinese Embassy; populated by at least three coughs in an attic room and a large footprint in the ground-floor mulch. All coppered domes and antennae up top, green as pea-soup in a cypress night.

Masses of people were absent from the city I grew up from; until I left London, I strangely don't remember noticing the crowds. In trying to describe the city, then, there are some aspects which I can observe with reasonable clarity: the traffic, noise and crowding, the class hierarchies (delineated architecturally and socially with a particularly back-arsed historicism), the drinking and eating cultures, the ways people gather socially, and the kinds of areas they gather in. But any attempt at describing my feel for London now - the identity it has for me - can only really take place in weathered and roughly-shod schematic images; webbed by the senses and experiences, the emotional thoughts and memories of my youth.

London was not defined by the deserts outside of it, but the deserts within it. All my memories which are now oddly fond, pained me terribly at the time. I bemoaned the lack of people to spend time with who lived near by me; the streets had me locked in and trapped, and it was difficult to forge connections with any of the ground in sight. Perhaps what makes a city is how it grows when you leave it behind - no matter what it was that pained or pleased you while you were first really there.