An old book, discarded for years and then picked up again, can be a potent reminder of a time, a place and a stage in your life, casting you straight back to the time when you first read it. I found it when I was sorting out a box of books recently. The perennial problem: too many books and not enough shelf space. The book I found was Time Out’s The Book of London. It is a narrow paperback of some 300 pages, densely printed in a tiny typeface on cheap, thin paper. The spine had split from over-use and many of the pages were loose. I carefully opened it and flicked through its pages. It smelled of 1973 and my mind instantly tumbled back to that era, to my youth.
I come from a working class family in which no one had ever been to university before. My mum was from Liverpool and my dad from Wales. They spent the first ten years or so of married life in London and my older brother was born there. Just before my birth, my dad’s father died and my parents decided to move to Wales to be near my newly-widowed grandmother.
My childhood, therefore, was spent in a small Welsh market town. But, from an early age, I was brought up on tales of my family’s time in London; the places, the characters and the events that were part of life in a big city. As I grew up I sensed the possibility of another life I might be leading, the exciting city-dwelling life which had been denied me.
This feeling strengthened when I entered my teens; I felt there was something missing, something that had been lost. With the judgemental dogmatism of youth I found my small town stifling and parochial and the concerns of most of my peers at school very limited. I had a small handful of friends and we would spend evenings in each other’s homes listening to albums. Later, from about the age of sixteen, we would go to gigs in Chester, Liverpool and Manchester and drink beer whenever we found a pub lax enough to serve us.
Throughout this time I fed my mind with books from the library by Thomas Hardy, the Brontës, Kurt Vonnegut, Hermann Hesse and others, I read the rock press assiduously and ordered alternative magazines like IT and Oz by mail whenever I could afford to pay for the postal order. My favourite though was Time Out. This was long before it became a global brand; it was the era when Time Out was a purely London listings magazine that wore its radical politics on its sleeve. My imagination was still beguiled by the lure of the big city.
Although I didn’t particularly enjoy school, I did well in my ‘O’ levels and moved up to the sixth form. I decided at about this time that I wanted to go to university. This was mainly because it would delay the awful prospect of having to work in a mind-numbing job for forty years. This, of course, was the time when bright working-class kids were paid a generous grant to go to university.
I wanted to go somewhere where there was a lively music scene, diverse people to meet, museums, galleries, theatres and interesting places to explore. For me that could only be one place, one city, and that was London.
I did OK in my ‘A’ levels and was predicted fairly good grades. So, by early 1973, I had an offer of a place at university in London and the promise of a full grant. Round about the same time, at a bookshop in Chester, I picked up a copy of Time Out’s The Book of London, the same one that is sitting on my desk now as I write.
I devoured this book, reading it from cover to cover, again and again. I read it in my bedroom at home, on the bus and in the canteen at the steelworks where I laboured that summer. It was the book with which I plotted my escape from, as I saw it, small town mundanity to the cultural cutting edge of the big city.
London did not disappoint; I had a wonderful time. I’m not particularly good at meeting new people, but was lucky enough to fall in with a great bunch of new friends from the off. I lived the kind of big city life I was hoping for, enjoying its possibilities to the full. But I do not actually recall ever opening The Book of London again. Its joy as a book was in the anticipation of the reality.
What a joy to read this in the limbo days between Christmas and New Year! So many echoes of my own experience, albeit mine was a few years later – when I arrived at college in London and escaped from rural life where we’d get thrown out of pubs just because of the way we looked, I felt I’d come home. Maybe we would have been in the same ‘karass’ 😉
Happy days, Mark! Sadly, Vonnegut seems to have fallen a bit out of fashion these days.
Oh, I loved this! I used to read Time Out in the 90s when I lived in London and so did my best friend. We used to enjoy reading Pete Paphides’ columns in it so I was very excited when I “met” him via email and then met him in real life (and I did tell him!). I never felt I made the most of my London life, having grown up in a slightly crap Kent dormitory town but having escaped to Birmingham, my true love, but it was interesting living there for a while.
Birmingham is definitely underrated!
Great to read this. We have similar backgrounds in many ways. In the same vein as The Book of London, I still have my 1973 copy of Alternative England and Wales (it’s the size of an old-fashioned telephone directory) – a portal into a world of other, alternative possibilities.
These everyday objects from the past, such as your 1973 book, are so evocative. On the one hand they are very familiar, at least for those of us who were there. On the other hand they are totally alien, because of the world we live in now. Have you seen my other blog post mentioning Passfield, by the way?