When I was growing up in a small town on the south-east coast of Ireland in the 1950s, London seemed as far away as Samarkand. We had seen it in the movies, of course — The Lavender Hill Mob, The Blue Lamp, The Ladykillers — but we knew that was all made up. The real city had to be seen to be believed. Yet when I went there for the first time as an eager 18-year-old, I was disconcerted. London looked exactly like London. It was only when I lived there that it became a foreign place.
I met a girl in Berkeley, California, in 1968, during what we dubbed the Summer of Assassinations — Robert Kennedy was the most notable casualty — and decided she was the one for me, as I was, it seemed, amazingly, the one for her. We were cautious, though, and decided to give ourselves a year on neutral ground, just in case. An aunt died and left me a modest sum, enough for me to quit Dublin and rent a flat in Fulham. On a September midnight my girl arrived in Gatwick on a flight from San Francisco. Each of us, as we confessed later, was worried we would not remember what the other looked like.
