I was born in Northolt, then in Middlesex, during the snowiest winter anyone remembered. “It was the winter of discontent,” stories began. The milk bottles were left uncollected, the streets were filled with rubbish, Mrs Thatcher was about to come to power. By the time she was gone, I was at senior school.
By then my parents had moved to Hanwell, London W7, the western extension of west Ealing. West of us was mostly open space, golf courses, the “Bunny park” with its splendid viaduct by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. There were a lot of canals. It was rural enough to spend an afternoon scooping frogspawn out of ditches and blackberrying in the lane that ran down to Greenford; urban enough that the river in the park was unpaddlable, a few brown inches of water that smelled of sponges. When I pulled out the pockets of my coat, bright sugared aniseeds were often stuck in the lining: the remnants of birthday parties at big, richly decorated Indian restaurants in Southall. On St Patrick’s Day I wore a wet bit of shamrock twisted in silver foil on my school jumper. I thought that when I grew up I might want to trade on exchange rates, like a friend’s father. I especially wanted to do this if it meant I could talk ceremoniously on a cream brick-shaped mobile phone.
Most of my ideas about the future were formed from books. Like many only children, I spent a lot of time in public libraries, and I read without much system: books about astrology, ballet, the Plantagenet kings, the whole Just William series. One summer, I asked the librarian to put aside anything that came in on “nuclear holocaust”. I read the Odyssey in prose translation many times over. Later I would read TS Eliot for the first time on the E1 bus home from school, the words moving before my eyes because I didn’t have a seat.
Perhaps where we come from is always a function of where we are. During the decade or so I spent living in the US, I saw my childhood in sepia and it seemed remote: the yellow-grey London brick, the brown checked fabric of the Tube seats, coming home from school in the wet and dark, a baked potato in the oven, a warm bath in the olive-brown tub. I saw it in the technologies of the period, as the jerky movements of a cine film, the camera swallowing the centre of the picture. I remembered tea dances at hotels and visiting the first world war veterans with school. My glasses were always smeary. I had flannelette pyjamas. As an adult, I wanted my edges to be less blurred with the rest of the world.
Now we live in Shepherd’s Bush, about five miles east of where I was born, and things are altered once again. At the weekends, our three-year-old begs to go to Horsenden hill in Perivale. He likes following the trail of Gruffalo figures there. “Where was the snake when you were a little girl, Mummy?” he asks. I say it hadn’t been put there yet. “Where was it, then?” I say I don’t know, maybe the book hadn’t been written yet. “What about the owl?” he asks.
We go to the Bunny park, too, and the River Brent still smells of sponges. I tell him that he can’t paddle in it because it’s full of rats’ urine. I tell him that my father told me this.
In fact, I find it hard to remember when the Gruffalo figures weren’t there. I can’t visualise Horsenden hill as the unbroken countryside of childhood picnics. Only the vanished things are hard-edged and definite: the salted, pulpy texture of the pit after a baby tooth is gone, the Filofax I was going to write in, the soft metallic clatter of the BT telephone exchange where my father worked.
• Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems (Faber) has been shortlisted for the Costa poetry award. To order a copy for £9.67 (RRP £10.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
