The Rise

Mine was the right of two, a light apiece showing dimly on the
pillow and casting its almost beams on the Micky Mouse clock on my
side of the wall. An early picture of mine: ‘The Golden Hind’ – I had
proudly rolled in elastic – lived on the chest by the door; the needle
and pine scented drawers were embalmed in life-old Times’ Sport pages, browning
on the fray. A wavering Tottenham in seventeenth – nothing changed there.

You awoke to the bee keeper’s buzz of the kitchen TV,
and enthused clunks and bells of the ripening-brown microwave;
there was always ‘four-across’ crossword chatter, scraping butter,
the dragging of protesting red-cushioned stools, crunching toast from
the rack, and then that smell from the larder: every manner of
marmalade, biscuit, rioja, cake and sell-by-date.