Oxford Street

When I was ten

I thought my brother was

God - he'd lie in bed and turn out the light with a fishing rod.

I learned the names of all his football team, aid

I still remembered them when

I was nineteen.

Strange the things deal that

I remember still - shouts from the playground when

I was home and ill.

My sister taught me all that she learned there; when we grow up, we said, we'd share a flat somewhere.

When I was seventeen,

London meant

Oxford Street.

Where I grow up there were no factories. there was a school and shops and some fields and trees, and rows of houses one by one appeared.

I was born in one and lived there for eighteen years.

Then when

I was nineteen.

I thought the

Humber would be the gateway from my little world into the real world.

But there is no real world - we live side by side, and sometimes collide. .

When I was seventeen,

London meant

Oxford Street.

It was a little world;

I grew up in a little world.