Oxford Street

When I was ten I thought my brother was God - he'd lie in bed and turn out the light with a fishing rod.

I learned the names of all his football team, aid I still remembered them when I was nineteen.

Strange the things deal that I remember still - shouts from the playground when I was home and ill.

My sister taught me all that she learned there; when we grow up, we said, we'd share a flat somewhere.

When I was seventeen, London meant Oxford Street.

Where I grow up there were no factories.

There was a school and shops and some fields and trees, and rows of houses one by one appeared.

I was born in one and lived there for eighteen years.

Then when I was nineteen.

I thought the Humber would be the gateway from my little world into the real world.

But there is no real world - we live side by side, and sometimes collide.

When I was seventeen, London meant Oxford Street.

It was a little world; I grew up in a little world.