When I was a kid we used to play football and cricket in the road, pausing and stepping aside to let the occasional car or van pass, but it would be impossible now. Whenever I go back to Brickley and turn into Lime Avenue from the main road I experience a mental lurch of memory, and I am a short-trousered schoolboy again, coming home in the late afternoon, socks round my ankles, shoes scuffed from playground football, looking forward to another game with my mates before being called in for tea and homework. It always seemed to me a nice street to come home to, and it still looks smarter and more inviting than the drab older terraces that surround it. The houses are covered in pebble-dash, with timber features painted in a variety of contrasting colours, and neat little front gardens with shrubs and flower pots and crazy-paving, though number 49 is looking a bit sad these days: the privet hedge needs cutting, the wooden gate is rotting along the bottom, and the short concrete path to the front door is fissured and uneven, with weeds growing in the cracks. Dad still insists on doing the basic maintenance himself, which means that it mostly doesn’t get done, or not done very well. Ten years ago, when he was recovering from an operation, he grudgingly agreed to let me pay somebody to repaint the house, but I dare not suggest having it done again in case he gets his ladders out and tries to do it himself.
I rang the doorbell, and then when that had no effect, used the door knocker, banging hard four times. Dad is hard of hearing - not as deaf as I am, but as he won’t use a hearing aid he is, for practical purposes, just as deaf as me, indeed rather more so. Five years ago, after a long and exhausting series of arguments, I finally persuaded him to be tested and fitted with an NHS hearing aid, but he complained that it was uncomfortable and fiddly, and the batteries kept packing up, and it whistled. He soon stopped wearing it. Living alone, he didn’t have much incentive to persevere. He listens to the television through headphones since the neighbours on the other side of the party wall complained of the volume coming through the speakers, and he has a telephone with a specially loud ring and a flashing light. But he often misses calls by tradesmen because he doesn’t hear the knocker, and if he hadn’t been expecting me I might have waited a long time for him to open the front door. The first sign that he was about to do so was that a curtain behind the round frosted-glass window in the door was drawn aside. This is a thick felt full-length curtain which he rigged up himself to keep the draughts out and the warmth in during the winter months. He keeps most of the other curtains in the house drawn or partially drawn for the same reason, adding a sepulchral gloom to the general seediness of the interior. The door opened. An elderly man dressed like a tramp smiled at me.
‘Hallo, son,’ he said. ‘You made it, then.’ He stood aside to admit me, then poked his head out of the door to look suspiciously up and down the road, as if he feared I might have been tailed by criminals bent on armed robbery, before shutting it and drawing the curtain. ‘How was the journey?’ he said, as I took off my overcoat and hung it on the coat rack by the door.
‘All right. The train was on time for once,’ I said.
‘What?’ This word occurs very frequently in our dialogues.
‘The train was on time,’ I shouted.
‘There’s no need to shout,’ he said, and led me along the passage into what we always called the dining room, presumably the estate agent’s designation, though it was and still is the living room, and a very small one, about thirteen feet square, I would guess. It’s at the back of the house, next to the kitchenette. The front room or ‘lounge’ is a little bigger, but was rarely occupied in my childhood except on high days and holidays, especially in winter because of the bother of lighting a second fire. The dining room did, it is true, contain the table where we ate most of our meals, and a sideboard, but it also contained two easy chairs and a bureau