There were times when you felt it to be the right age: sixteen, in London, in 1956. Behind you were the terrors of growing up (God and church and family respectability); before you, something unknown but not unappealing. You liked living in a flat in a house joined to other houses; it was the opposite of the isolation of inhabiting that big old house in Harris’, in Montserrat, with your grandmother. You liked it that there seemed a sense of order in the street; streets regularly swept (the pavement, even, swept by some of the tenants or owners), the milkman leaving pints of milk on the doorstep, and no one stealing them. Riding the huge trolley-buses that hurtled down the Harrow Road towards Royal Oak seemed wonderfully risky and daring as they sent out blue sparks overhead, where their attachments slid along the electric cables high above the street. And there was the cinema, less than five minutes’ walk away, showing westerns, Alan Ladd, in Shane; all sorts.

Queuing was an interesting social activity. We admired the orderliness of the English, the fact that everyone seemed to recognise precedence and no one pushed ahead. Even if one person was busy and another idle, the busy person was still prepared to wait in the queue behind the one who might have nothing much to do. We admired this; but was it right? Was the valuable time of the busy to be wasted by the person in front who might have nothing pressing to occupy himself, herself? I remembered “at home” in Harris’ the procedure when letters came for the house. Teacher Kitty, across the way, was the Post Mistress, and at five o’clock in the afternoon she started distributing letters for the village. Well before five, people expecting letters would gather in Teacher Kitty’s yard next to the playing field, waiting in expectation, their backs to the garage. And then at five o’clock Teacher Kitty would come to the door of her dining-room facing the yard, with a pile of letters in her hand. The door was made of two halves, and the bottom half would be locked, so what you saw would be Teacher Kitty — fairly large was Teacher Kitty — from the waist up holding up the pile of letters preparing to call out the names. Of course this didn’t apply to us. I, or whoever went to collect the mail, never stood with the crowd because Teacher Kitty put our (pre-sorted) letters aside on her large dining table, and whenever one of us arrived she broke off from what she was doing and handed over the letters. In England, though you missed that sense of special treatment, queuing was a fairly painless lesson in democracy. (But others had to play the game; you heard mutterings — you sometimes read it in the papers — that some English people had reservations about standing in the queue behind the “coloured immigrants.” One unintended consequence of this was having on occasion to minister to a white friend who got upset over having witnessed unfair treatment of a “coloured” person.)

In our second (temporary) house — in Goldney Road, just round the corner from Sutherland Avenue — the house beside it gone, a bombed site that children sometimes played in, despite the warning that there might be an unexploded German bomb concealed there: you were, you thought with some sense of daring, in pioneer country. There was a feeling of release, also, that rationing had ended only three or so years back. Two or three years later, at school, we would discuss, in the common room, new buildings going up on the bombed sites: there was a sense, as a schoolboy, in being engaged in a discussion of how the new London should look. You disapproved of many of the new buildings going up, the flats off the Harrow Road that you had to witness on your way to school, the large church being rebuilt on the other side of Kilburn, in Quex Road, the West Hampstead end, put together by Irish volunteers: we, Londoners, deserve better, you thought.

At night you were watchful; you took the KEEP BRITAIN WHITE stickers more seriously; you avoided walking through certain areas that might be problematic. (Often, on your wanderings, an unknown man from the Caribbean would cross the road to tell you that there was trouble at such and such a place ahead, and suggest that you took another route to wherever you were heading.) But London seemed very big, avoiding trouble relatively easy; you were obviously perceived to be at greater risk if your partner was white-skinned. In those days my partner was white-skinned. That was, in fact, the real front line.

At some point — into the 60s — down from university and at home in Kilburn, I used regularly to visit my friend Chinque in Hendon, just up from the tube station, Hendon Central. We would perhaps see a film at the Classic cinema, where Chinque’s mother worked in the box office; and then repair to the Chinque household where Mrs Chinque, back home again and the proud housewife, would produce one of her tasty snacks; then there might be a bit of talk, a bit of television. Afterwards I would set out to walk back to Kilburn. The journey took about an hour. The problematic bit was Cricklewood: there was a club on the main road where there was often a fight — West Indians and Irishmen, apparently, the worse for drink, settling their differences. You could tell well in advance whether it was safe to walk past the club. One option was to circle it and go round the back streets. But you’d do that only if you were sure it wasn’t safe to go along the main road, which was well-lit. The side streets, being dark, felt less safe. You got home feeling a sense of relief; but you got home feeling that you were exploring London, with a view, ultimately, of possessing it.

The sense of belonging/not belonging never left you, because to assume that you belonged in this or that group and to discover that you didn’t would destroy your confidence and make you wonder if you were making a fool of yourself. At Kilburn, for instance, at school, one of our friends in the GCE class, E.C. (I must use his initials), admitted to me that he would not go out with a Jewish girl. Now, E.C. was as close as anyone to many of the Jewish girls (and lads) from Edgware and Golders Green, and I’m sure none of them knew that this was his feeling. (The boys, in particular, tended to think (or pretend) that there was no anti-Semitism in the school.) But of course, the message to me was that E.C. would be even less likely to go out with a black girl. Could I, I asked myself, be as sanguine as the Jewish boys, thinking that their friends weren’t prejudiced, because it suited their view of themselves? It gets more problematic when someone confides (another boy at Kilburn) to not having liked black people until he ran into me. What are the conversations, you ask yourself (endlessly) taking place in those homes (including those you visited) between family members on the issue of black people residing in Britain? When I look back now at the literature of the time, that type of family discourse seems, more or less, edited out. But London was bigger than its spoilers — even those at Notting Hill in ’58. That was what you affected to believe. Indeed, that was what you believed.

And yet there are times when you think that the right age has passed. What is it? Is it the endless reports of stabbings, casual murder on the streets that make you fear for a hapless Little Nell’s grandfather prowling the streets of London after dark? Of course, you know that London is safer now than it was then. But was it safer than in 1959 (or ’65) when you ventured out at night and feared running into Irishmen and West Indians with voices and fists raised in Cricklewood? And then there are the terrorists who are no longer Irish, of a different kind; and no longer give a warning. And everyone you knew then is fifty years older, or dead. It’s amazing to the visitor I am now, to someone who no longer lives in the capital, that whenever you contact anyone from that time the conversation runs to a funeral, just attended. If enough black people are buried or cremated in a place, does that strengthen the claim of ownership of those of the “clan” who are alive?

On the other side of the funeral there is carnival. The Caribbean’s splash of colour to liven up the scene for a couple of days each year. It’s made its mark. It’s had policemen dancing in the streets; the research invested in the costumes is commendable. Would this were a transferable skill.

I    iremember reading Virginia Woolf’s sketches about London, done in 1931–32 for Good Housekeeping magazine. (I scanned the Diaries for any barbed references to her writing for Good Housekeeping, but couldn’t find any.) Woolf’s perspective is of someone travelling on the river, with appalled fascination of the London Docks, the squalor, her delight at coming unexpectedly on a splendid building (Greenwich Hospital), etc. But really, what intrigued me was Virginia Woolf’s view of the ocean liners come to anchor in the Port of London. There is romance, there is a sense of these disparate, floating “palaces” from all over the world coming to pay homage, here, at the centre.

Well, it was and wasn’t like that for those of us who might have come here on one of those boats. In my case, the three-week boat trip ended in Genoa, from there by train to Paris, and London. But London was for us, also, the centre of something long imagined, and my own family still think it odd that I have chosen to spend so much of my life outside London. (Outside England.) The difference between Virginia Woolf’s view of London and mine wasn’t, I imagine, the difference between Bloomsbury and the Maida Vale/Ladbroke Grove/Kilburn perspectives of my first few years in the capital (we never accepted that we were contemporary versions of Woolf’s shop-assistants living in “little villas at Croydon and Surbiton”): the difference with Woolf was nearer to a view of the ships that came to the London docks.

Boarding the ship in Montserrat in 1956 we knew that we were setting out on a journey far beyond Antigua, thirty miles away; further, even, than to America or to Canada, where our family who went to those places hadn’t returned, except for a couple of elderly great aunts and great uncles, all fairly remote figures. And what of the boat?

Cousin Gen (the most prominent of the Osborne clan) had bought a big boat, in Bermuda, a short time before, and it had sunk. It was a liner, large enough to sail up the islands to America, and it had been sunk on its maiden voyage home to Montserrat. Foul play, they whispered. Whatever word we used for “racism” then, was whispered. Cousin Gen, our family, was a black man; and the captain and crew of his new ship were white; and it was whispered on the island that a white captain and crew were not happy about a man who was black owning such a big boat. So the boat sank, and the captain and crew survived. (Of course, boats had sunk before, but these were smaller craft.) And now we were about to board an Italian boat for England: if we came across rough seas, who would be put into the lifeboats? Some said lifeboats were for tourists and we didn’t know if we were tourists. Though if anything happened we would pretend to be tourists and head for the lifeboats.

No one knew for certain if it was better to sail in an Italian rather than an English boat (which would have been preferred); but speculation was soon given up almost at the start of these three weeks of frightening water, with nearly everyone below deck sick, and with a differently sick smell coming from the kitchens as you struggled up to dinner. Fewer made it to dinner each day; in the end there was no one to drink the wine which kept being put on the table. Dear Virginia.

Casting her patrician eye on the “dismal” dockyard, past the “sinister” dwarf city of workmen’s houses and warehouses, Woolf notes the gasometer — a word I associate so firmly with cricket commentary and John Arlott and Brian Johnston that I’m impressed that Virginia Woolf knew the term: surely, it has everything to do with Hall and Griffith coming in to bowl at that particular end of the Oval, and nothing to do with Bloomsbury and rural Sussex.
What was romantic about London in those days? they ask me. Oh, start with the bombed sites round the corner, which gave you a new view of England, less perfect, breachable, less intact, more manageable than you feared, a place you might now explore without having to adopt the posture of a supplicant. It encouraged you to see yourself as something of a pioneer, not an immigrant: as there were bits of London unbuilt (almost, you could pretend, for your benefit) you could somehow be part of the refashioning.

Come to think of it, the real difference between Virginia Woolf’s portrait of London and mine was less to do with the image of ships and more to do with the magic of prose: when she talks of the oddities that turn up, inadvertently, at the warehouses in those sacks of cinnamon, “a snake, a scorpion, a beetle, a lump of amber, a diseased tooth of an elephant, a basin of quicksilver . . .” we are prepared for the delights of her later flights of fancy as she goes on to distinguish between an elephant’s tusk and the tusk of a mammoth: the mammoth’s ivory, you see, tending to warp, so no good for billiard balls, only good for umbrella handles, etc. The conceit is humbling.

The difference, too, is the sense of ownership exhibited by Woolf over the place called London, the Houses of Parliament, the Tower, and Westminster Abbey, the casual observation that “It was always February” in the house of the puritan Carlyles (in Chelsea) whereas Keats’s house in Hampstead was suggestive of Spring etc. When Woolf drops in on the house where Carlyle once lived, it isn’t to learn something about how prominent lives were arranged, but with the confidence of someone long grounded in this place, all critical features intact. (She notes that there was no water laid on in the house, water having to be pumped from a well in the kitchen — Carlyle’s biographers not having noted this detail. From that observation Virginia Woolf sketches out the “battlefield” that was Carlyle’s fight against dirt, cold, and termites; and senses again the “oppression” which the women — mistress and maid — endured to make life bearable. And her wicked wit: her call for a house to have “bath, h & c., gas fires in the bedrooms, all modern conveniences and indoor sanitation,” which, she knows, would not have made the “Scottish” Carlyles different from the people they were.
So, here was a writer.

We had been strangely relaxed, in 1956, in leaving behind all that could not be fitted into my mother’s famous trunk. I have been prompted, over the years, to recall some of the things left out of the trunk. It makes predictable reading. Now, if I were a surrealist writer, I would pack so much more into that trunk. I would fit the whole house, really, into it; and that would include Nellie (who came in every day to do the washing and ironing and cooking) and Sarah (who — my age — ran errands, went to school, and slept in). It would include our horse, Ruby, as well as the splendid views from the verandah in Harris’: the trunk, opened in Sutherland Avenue, the eye would soar over the playing fields up towards the mountains shrouded in mist. That’s in one direction. In the other, a couple of miles down beyond Farms village and Bethel to the sea — one would release that view, too, from the trunk.

One night I dreamt of Pilate, our barber; I suppose we would have had to pack him, too, in the trunk. Pilate was dumb and followed my mother’s instructions (rather than mine) to cut my hair: did my mother have special skills, I now wonder, in talking to the deaf and dumb? I recall the scene of sitting in the yard of the little house in the village that Pilate rented from us. (One half of the house, rented from us.) I expect the barbering was in part payment. I would be sitting on a chair under a tree, partly draped in a white sheet, with Pilate standing over me with his scissors poised, and whatever the close-shaving implement was called. Passers-by would pause to comment, sometimes engage in a lengthy chat with the dumb man, and no one seemed to doubt that he understood what was being said. (Sign language was, of course, unknown to us.) Is it, I wonder, more difficult to write dialogue for a dumb man than for a stranger coming towards you, in London?

Talking of the trunk, it being a magic thing, I would pack the entire island into it, for it was a small island. And this being 1956, it would have escaped the hurricane, and the volcano.

It is undignified, when you are a certain age, to talk about regrets, and, on the whole, the god of biology has been kind to the family; and, if I’m allowed a cliché, the glass of ambition is half-full rather than half-empty. There are so many houses owned by the family, in so many places, it would be churlish to complain about the loss (or lack) of home. When, occasionally, I walk past a house we once inhabited, and imagine the new owners secure in possession, I think of my mother, coming like a ghost in the night and giving them a turn: it would be good for them to know that she had resided there before them, and that the walls of their castle are breachable. It is a sadness, though, that she hasn’t yet found her way to my modest abode, in Paris.