Sophie Ratcliffe - The Lost Properties of Love

The carriage got crowded around about Highgate, and then my father stood above me in his suit, holding on to one of the fibreglass globes on bendy springs, swaying until the crush of bodies in the carriage held him still. He was one of many commuters crammed into this train in the spring of 1983. They all looked the same – the million Mr Averages switching on for work. George Michael wore blue jeans rolled up at the ankle and white trainers and a black leather jacket. They wore navy mackintoshes and pinstriped suits. Looking up at the sea of grey Denby-pressed fabric, I reached out to steady myself on the wrong legs.

Camden was a crush of bodies moving this way and that through the various tunnels, taking the ‘via Bank’ people onwards to Charing Cross, allowing those who were journeying on the two branches of the northern bit of the Northern Line to swap over. But the platform to Edgware and Colindale was always quieter and the train was nearly empty. By 8 a.m. we were heading back out to the suburbs up the other branch, making what on the map looked like exactly the same journey, but backwards, and five centimetres lower down.

There were no escalators at Belsize Park. The lifts were closed with expanding iron doors, like a concertina cage, and they juddered their way up to the surface. Once the lift broke and we made our way up the steps, circling into the same grey rain and red brick of Haverstock Hill – the place where the not-suburban people lived.

Much of that journey is now, for me, not lost, but trapped in time. Just one of the ways that time tends to trap us. Everything about that journey was regularised too. There is something about the world of commuting that washes a sense of difference out of things and people. Commuters may look the same. Every day, they inhabit the same space. They follow the same timetable. They ride the same train. People, like trains, were regular beings. They did not transform, or mutate. They did not go changing.

Wishing for difference was one of my favourite childhood activities. On the way to school each day, I read on the train. I’d like to think my father did. But the rows of his books on the bookshelf at home – The Day of the Triffids , Rumpole , The Great Railway Bazaar , Homage to Catalonia – don’t look like the sort of things you’d carry on the Tube in the morning. If I strain my memory hard, perhaps he is holding a newspaper, or a last-minute sheaf of figures. As I sat there on my itchy seat, I read in envy of other people’s hair and clothes, their houses and their relatives, their food and their wallpaper. I read because other people’s halls were invariably bigger than ours. Other people’s houses had multiple floors. Other people’s mothers wore sunglasses. Other people’s families took me out for lunch to restaurants that served puddings called The Outrageous . Other people’s fathers carried mobile phones.

Even when they were doing nothing, other people’s families did it better than mine. On a Saturday afternoon, the Bakers stretched out on a chaise longue or lay on the floor reading newspapers. The Shermans faced each other across the shag pile in articulated padded loungers, drinking frozen orange juice from individual snack trays. The Greens had a swimming pool and a petting zoo. Life was an Argos catalogue of alternative possibilities, and envy was my hobby and my salvation. I was an expert in it.

Going through East Finchley, I read on – for other, better homes and better stories. Ballet Shoes on the Brompton Road. Windsor Gardens. Avonlea. Tara. Kansas. Oz. I read of The Ordinary Princess and Minnie the Minx. I read of Peter and Mollie and the Wishing-Chair with its bulbous legs and temperamental little red wings. I loved the shiny blue hardback cover, Mollie’s hairband and ponytail combo, and the spiked violet creams that did for the Ho-ho Wizard. Most of all, I loved the scene where Mollie and Peter’s mother takes a liking to their flying chair and brings it into the house. Then Mollie, pretty Mollie, who never does anything out of turn, goes for the Blyton equivalent of an ASBO. She thinks up the deliberately naughty idea of vandalising it in order to get it back, taking the sewing scissors to the cushion, spilling ink on the upholstery and kicking the legs until it is ruined.

I wanted to vandalise their chair too – not to help them, but because I wanted what they had and I couldn’t have it. Peter and Mollie had an Emergency Exit. If I were them, I could fly out of the window, out of the semi-detached world. I read on. Addicted to the kind of novels in which exceptionally ordinary children are ‘discovered’ by directors and thrust upon the stage, I stared at the man who got on the train at Kentish Town, who could have been a casting agent. If I stared hard enough, perhaps my story would transform itself into something else, something extraordinary.

There is something childlike in memory, which makes me conceive of my father as a perpetual commuter. Though the act of remembering him is sudden (it lands with violence, like a carriage lurching off the rails), the image of him is steady in my mind. And the picture that unfolds is predictable, regular, moving according to a pattern I have long established.

We are walking out of the station. He holds my schoolbag in one hand and encloses my hand in his other. His are large and blunt-fingered, with freckled backs, rough from fixing cars, but soft to touch. Over five days, he explains to me exactly how a carburettor works. I listen, with half an ear, trying to understand, but also just following the rise and fall of his voice.

When he dropped me at the gates, he handed over my satchel, and turned to smile and wave. He was an enigma to me, as he floated off to an office in a place called Elephant and Castle. I imagined it as a place of Eastern mystery, with turreted castles and elephants floating on clouds, dozens of them in diagonal lines, like wallpaper, ridden by men in suits. After he said goodbye, I looked for a moment at his long grey-legged figure walking down the road, holding the image, and then turned away. Standing there, I never thought about where he would be going next. It didn’t occur to me that to get me there he was going round in circles, heading back once more down the same line – turning again in order to go on.

Annette believed in the telephone

Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter

Nine years after that goodbye in New York, Kate Field came back to London, and set up a temporary home there for the next few winters. She would have needed that umbrella. The weather was predictably terrible, a pasticcio of rain , she called it, and endless fog. For two days, an enormous fall of snow brought everything to a halt. The brougham cabs refused to leave their stands, with an enterprising few hiking their fares at night to a surge rate. Field took to walking everywhere, her skirts shortened to save them from the grey slush on the pavement. The flash of black gumboot underneath mystified the boot blacks sitting on the street corners. She rode the omnibus to Baker Street, where she walked past the Smithfield poultry show, to stare at a wax model of the Nawab Gholana Hussein Khan, resplendent in his green and gold, standing next to the latest version of the Prince of Wales. She visited the Zoological Gardens and spoke at public dinners, went from St George-in-the-East to Belgravia, and from Jamroab’s Wild Beast Bazaar to Parliament itself. She sat on the earliest version of the Circle Line, yet to become a circle, making her way from Baker Street to Moorgate Street, up the Metropolitan Line.

In those days, the Underground was crawling around London like a giant caterpillar, chewing up the pavements and creating enormous piles of earth. As new stations were built, people picked their way on planks towards their houses. You can see photographs of its making – three workmen staring at the camera with their arms crossed, a rare sighting of Britain’s black Victorians. Soon, the idea of travelling in a tunnel became a fact of life. People were becoming accustomed to the sight of carriages appearing from archways, into the grubby twilight, with the silhouette of St Paul’s in the background. Used to the turnstiles and tickets and the confusion of losing things in the hurry.