A talk from a tentative teenager

A talk from a tentative teenager

By Julie Myerson
Published: Mar 22, 2008 

I haven't lived there in more than 25 years - even my mum finally moved away and left the area. These days the only time I ever go there is as someone else: the local girl who grew up to be an author; the woman who only returns to her home town these days to read from a new novel, discuss her work, answer questions. The journey from London lasts two hours. In the old days I scrimped and scrounged to buy my train ticket. These days everything is paid for by my publisher.

And it ought to feel - what? - glamorous, coming back like this? It ought to feel like I'm the person who in the end did exactly what she always said she'd do - write for a living; a lap of honour. Why, then, does returning here always turn me back into that tentative teenager, on her reluctant way home, yanking her bag off the dull dirty train at Midland Station and setting off to walk into town?

Into town. My home town. These days you can get a tram straight into the city centre - a gleaming, European kind of experience - but I don't do that. I still do the walk, unchanged in more than 25 years - over the bridge, passing the slippery grey canal, through streets that float with litter and pigeons, and down, down the walkway into the Broadmarsh Centre. Grubby, tiled, desolate. A lone, white-faced boy on a bicycle barely bothering to swerve around you.

And then, up in the shopping centre, sudden, desperate fluorescent lighting and harsh music. Boys in red paper hats forcing passers-by to try some sort of food. A sausage slice. A corner of cracker. A promotion for this or that. Moving on, past the man asleep against the wall, past the people in purple collecting for charity, the huddled office workers eating pork pies out of paper bags in their lunch hour.

In the Market Square - the square where I'd come alive, meeting my first love by the big stone lions - only the tram lines are new. The Bell Pub's still there. Girls still dress in impossible clothes, white cotton flapping against blue legs in the freezing wind. And Smithy Row, where I'd go with Mum to buy meat from Burton's - breathing in the gamey smell of those meat counters, the sad, open-mouthed fish, the blocks of yellow cheese, men in their white coats, cheeks dark from the refrigerated air - is now just clothes shops such as French Connection and Karen Millen.

Across the road, though, Debenham's is still there. "I was 15," I tell my audience at the library, "And I had a Saturday job over there at Debenham's. I was a floater - hosiery one week, ladies' separates the next. On my tea-break in the canteen I gobbled novels - Graham Greene, Wilkie Collins, Daphne du Maurier. And at lunch I came over here to the library and consulted The Writer's and Artist's Yearbook, looking for an agent for when I became a proper writer myself."

A flicker of laughter here.

"Then one day, sick of floating around Debenham's, I asked if there was a job here at the library. And there was - a man called Mr Vinnicombe took me on."

"Oh, but he only just retired last year!" gasps the lady who organised the event.

"Well, he gave me a job and I loved it. Working here among the books, stamping and issuing and re-shelving. And in the lunch hour I'd sit upstairs and write short stories, poetry, anything. And it was funny, because no one in our family was a writer. We didn't know any writers. But if someone had come up to me then, at 15 or 16, and told me that one day in the far distant future I'd be sitting right here reading from and talking about my 7th novel, I wouldn't have been even slightly surprised. It was exactly what I expected, what I knew would happen. I was incredibly precocious, you see. My self-belief was unshakeable!" More laughter.

I tell them all of this. I tell it as a story - a true tale both for and against myself. The dreamy, precocious girl who wanted to write. And the more I tell it the less I understand it, the less likely it seems. Is it really possible, the 15-year-old in me wonders, that all of this really did happen? Did I actually get exactly what I'd dreamed of? And if I did, then what's happened to all my tender astonishment? Why don't I feel it more now? Why do I still return to this strange, unfamiliar city feeling like a fugitive, a nobody, a pretender?

After the reading, a woman comes up to me. "There was something about you in the Evening Post," she says, "A few years back. Pictures of you when you were young. Something about haunted Nottingham."

"Mmm," I say, not really remembering. Not that she requires an answer. She just needed to say it.

An elderly man presses an envelope into my hands. "A short story I wrote," he whispers, "Have a look at it for me, will you?" And he's gone before I can tell him I just don't have time to read manuscripts.

I walk back through the city, catch the 4.07 back to London. The train's slow and I'm tired. The landscape that speeds past the window turns mauve then grey, then black. Horizontal streaks of rain. Next to me a young man sits for the whole journey, hands on lap, staring straight ahead. I find myself making up stories about what he might be thinking.