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start. It was the place where Destry-Scholes was Destry-Scholes, as opposed to the biographer of Bole.
    I would have liked to go to the Bosphorus, but it was financially out of the question.
    Pontefract is a small town in Yorkshire with nothing much to recommend it, except a very large, largely ruined castle, where Richard II died. It must once have commanded a confluence of important roads and rivers, but now is famous only for a kind of liquorice coin called a Pontefract cake. I do not like liquorice, and wondered whether Destry-Scholes did. He might have felt a local pride in the local product. Or not. I went there on a coach, changing at York to a local bus.
    I had the address of the house from which his birth had been registered; it was on the way out of the town, in the direction of a village called East Hardwick. I walked there, looking at shopfronts, bus stops, pubs, supposing I might feel his presence, and registering, accurately and honourably, that I felt nothing. His parents’ names were what I thought of as “posh.” Robert Walter and Julia Ann—especially Julia—were not working-class names. I had expected number 8 Askham Way to be a substantial house, a house with an orchard, or anyway a big garden, where an imaginative boy might play, a house with gables and dormer windows. When I found 8 Askham Way, it was a red box in a row of red brick boxes, all attached to each other.
    They had little strips of front garden, and, for the most part, little wrought-iron garden gates with latches. They hadtiled roofs and identical fronts—a thin door, with a high knob and a dull metal letterbox, beside a cramped bay window with leaded lights. Above the door were little porthole windows, and two square upper-storey windows, also leaded, with catches, not sashes. There was a laburnum tree in flower next to the gate of number 8, which had a well-kept lawn, and a border of Californian poppies. I do not know how long-lived laburnum trees are. I stood there, trying to think what to think. Askham Way is simply this row of red brick boxes set back from a main road. There is a new and shiny Texaco garage on the other side, which certainly does not date back to 1925. Nor do the street lamps, which are concrete and ugly. The house resembles, quite a lot, the square red brick box in which I was born in a suburb of Nottingham. I tried not to think of this. I don’t like the place where I was born, and don’t go there. Destry-Scholes’s childhood is nothing at all to do with mine. The sky was blue with a few aeroplane exhaust trails, also things not to be seen in 1925. A woman came past me, carrying a brown imitation-leather bag of shopping (bread and bananas sticking out) and wearing a bright green beret. She asked if I needed help.
    I said I was looking for a man who used to live there. Who was born there in the late twenties, I said, trying to make it less remote. She said she had only been there five months and couldn’t help, and the people she had bought it from hadn’t been there long, either. She smiled, and went down the path, and into the house, and shut the door.
    I went on looking at the red box, trying to think what to think. I felt a feeling I used to have going into our own red box—that such boxes are the only
real
homes
real
people livein—everything else is just images and fantasies. I also felt that they were traps, with their narrow doors, and boxy stairs, and busily divided-up little windows. Or like beehives, repeating similar cells.
    I noticed that the woman was looking at me out of an upstairs window. She drew the curtains with a swish. After a moment, she appeared at the other upstairs window, looked at me again, and swished those curtains, too. She may have done that every evening. Or not.
    I felt like a voyeur. I also felt like a failure. I could have said something different and she might have asked me to tea and told me about the Pontefract of the past. (It