Family Matters

My father called it 'turning a deaf ear' and it was an essential life skill if you wanted to read a book in our crowded family home. My deaf ear was turned to the squabbles and squeals of much younger siblings. It also tuned out my mother's peremptory, 'You're not doing anything, come and do the drying-up', if I thought I'd already done my bit on the domestic front – cleared the dishes, put down the drop-leaves of the table and restored it to the window bay, swept the crumbs from the carpet – and was entitled to pick up where I'd left off in my latest library volume of Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie or Noel Streatfeild.

The library was at the corner of Old Kent Rd and New Kent Rd. It was a mock-gothic structure with stained glass windows recalling Chaucer and his pilgrims about to set out for Canterbury, telling stories along the way. I felt some responsibility for Chaucer, as I did for Shakespeare, the site of whose theatre at Bankside was also within walking distance. I had been born into a neighbourhood that gave birth to English Literature. This was obviously a glorious thing, and long before I read either Chaucer or Shakespeare I proselytized about their virtues to my father, a slum child who had grown up in Blackfriars and gone to a school named Charles Dickens. Very willing to accede in the abstract, my father had neither time nor inclination to venture on the classics, which he viewed as beyond – meaning above –him. It was he who took me to the library.

I didn't prefer the world of books but I did think books gave me access to the real world, and that it was a world my parents knew nothing of. My mother, an immigrant from Greece, read only the simplest of English sentences; my father occasionally packed a thriller into his saddle-bag if he was cycling off to the night shift. He was a turbine operator at Bankside power station. At night informal rules prevailed: he said you could often 'get your head down' between tasks. I learned about the importance of Chaucer and Shakespeare from teachers who came from richer parts of London –Kensington, Highgate, Clapham – to educate the poor of Southwark and Bermondsey. They conveyed a sense of rightful possession while being willing to share what they had, as a gift. The keenest pupils were invited into the uplands. Literature was for everybody, but at the same time only certain people seemed to know this.

I joined another library after I began secondary school in Bermondsey. It was in Spa Road and it was associated with a more recent writer, George Orwell, who wrote some of Down and Out in Paris and London in the reference room while he lodged at a Tooley Street doss-house. I was entirely mistaken in thinking my father would appreciate ex-Etonian Orwell's descent into the lower depths and his friendships with vagrants. The final straw came when I explained that Orwell had asked advice about how to get himself arrested because he wanted to experience a short spell in prison. 'Bloody fool', was the response. But a prison cell appealed to me too, as an extension of the quiet in the library. The custodians at Spa Road, the teachers at school, the friendly policeman at the zebra crossing on whom I had a crush, and uniformed officers with caring dispositions and keys hanging from their belts, all figured for me as elements in a single organism, a public realm whose intentions towards me were wholly benevolent. If I ended up in jail I didn't think I would be unhappy.

London was my city and I was proud of how much more it gave me than it had given my father. His schooling ended at fourteen; I was able to stay until eighteen and then go to university. By staying at school beyond fifteen, then the statutory leaving age, I brought no money into the household but nor did my choice put much of a strain on...