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parked and uniform rows of Morris Ladybirds, the “people’s car” which is manufactured in vast quantities just down the road at Cowley. They all look like jelly moulds. I turn from the little lawns and fake-castellations of semi-detached and semi-skilled Lancelot Street onto the wider middle-management and mock-Tudor expanses of Falstaff Road. The street lamps nod their heads wisely. A cat yowls. A baby cries. A dustbin lid bangs down in an alleyway.
    I was born in Lichfield—which, then as now, is a town which calls itself a city—in the year 1880. It’s middle England, neither flat nor hilly, north or south. And so far from the sea that there’s one of the stone markers nearby asserting that it—and not Meriden, Banbury, or even Hexham as James I once claimed in his cups—marks the proper centre of England. Barring Doctor Johnson being born and a messy siege in the Civil War, nothing much has ever happened there.
    Thinking about it all now, the way that things have turned out, my parents were pioneers of much that has since happened in Britain. They owned their own house in one of the newer and more decent terraced developments that were then springing up around Stow Pool and behind the Cathedral. Inside toilet, running hot and cold, built-in stove, decorated picture rails. I really don’t know exactly how they came to meet each other and get married. They always seemed unsure themselves—it was just one of those things that happen to you, like the job you ended up doing, having a minor operation, or losing your hair—although they agreed that it probably had something to do with a shared distant relative. They were both of good Midlands stock; my family tree soon gets lost in meandering repetitions of Johns and Marys, Smiths and Coopers, carpenters and stockmen. Of course, there was talk about some great old house and all the wealth that a scandalous uncle had squandered. There always is. I can even remember my grandmother who lived in Malvern claiming to have been a childhood friend—at least a schoolmate—of Edward Elgar. Not that she really knew who he was when I questioned her, other than that he had done well for himself.
    I remember the rainbows of light that the glass pendants of the parlour lamp used to throw across the wall. A single child, I also remember feeling bored at home and looking forward to and then enjoying school, although somehow wishing there was more to it. I wanted to know about kings and queens, volcanoes and other planets, sea monsters… I had little time for passing around jars filled with object lessons—a bit of honeycomb, a monkey’s femur—or copying letters onto a slate, or ploughing through shared copies of Little Black Sambo and Down On The Farm.
    My father worked for Lichfield Corporation. He had a title that changed once or twice amid great glory and talk of more ambitious holidays, but he was always Assistant-this and Deputy-that—one of the great busy-but-unspecified (“Well, it’s quite hard to explain what I do unless you happen to be in the same line yourself…”) who now so dominate this country. Basically, he was an accounts clerk, and when he came home each evening, he smelled of underarms and India ink and rubber. Once I was old enough to make my own cheese sandwiches, my mother took a job at Hindleys’ Cake Shop on Bird Street. Dough and raisin buns—another smell that returns to me. She’d often bring home squashed battenburgs like broken bits of board game, or the stale and fly-blown remains of the hollow wedding cakes that were displayed in Hindleys’ window for a month or two. Here’s a treat for you, son … A crunchy spiral of icing. Little diamonds of angelica that looked and tasted like snot.
    Even then, long before I had the faintest idea what sex was, I knew that I was different. It always seemed as though I was stuck in some odd pattern, clothed and yet naked like that Emperor in the fable, in a way that other people either ignored or