… L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Une fois …

Then I would lie in bed, half-asleep, half-awake, listening for the postman’s footsteps on the staircase. For some reason I have never lost faith, not since I was a young child, in the power of letters to transform my existence. The mere sight of an envelope lying on my doormat can still flood me with anticipation, however transitory. Brown envelopes rarely do this, it has to be said; window envelopes, never. But then there is the white, handwritten envelope, that glorious rectangle of pure possibility which has even shown itself, on some occasions, to be nothing less than the threshold of a new world. And this morning, while I gazed with heavy, expectant eyes into the hallway through the half-open door of my bedroom, just such an envelope slid noiselessly into my flat, carrying with it the potential to transport me, not only onward into an unsuspected future but at the same time backward, back to a moment in my childhood more than thirty years ago, when letters first started to play an important part in my life.

∗

Messrs Bulb, Plugg and Sockitt,

Electricians since 1945 (or a ¼ to 8),

24 Cable Crescent,

Meterborough.

26 July 1960

Dear Mr Owen,

We must apologize for the delay in connecting the electricity supply to your new home, viz. the second cowshed on the left on Mr Nuttall’s farm.

The truth is that we have been somewhat amp-ered in our attempts by the failure of our latest recruit, a bright spark if ever I saw one, to turn up for work. As a result, we realize that you have now been without electricity for several weeks, through no volt of your own.

Watt are we going to do about it, you ask? Rest assured, Mr Owen, that your supply will be connected a.s.a.p.,∗ and in the meantime please accept this small gift as a token of our goodwill – a month’s supply of current buns (enclosed).

Yours sincerely,

A. Daptor

(Head of Complaints).

∗

Once upon a time, a short walk from my parents’ house along quiet roads would bring you to the edge of a wood. We lived at the point where Birmingham’s outermost suburbs began to shade into countryside, in a placid, respectable backwater, slightly grander and more gentrified than my father could really afford, and every weekend, usually on a Sunday afternoon, the three of us would set off for this wood on one of those long, mildly resented walks which have since become the nucleus of my earliest and happiest memories. There were various routes available, each given its own functional (but at the time intensely romantic and evocative) designation: ‘the glade’; ‘the ponds’; ‘the dangerous way’. But I had a personal favourite which, though we must have taken it more often than any other, never failed to exert its pull of (even then) nostalgic glamour. This was known simply as ‘the farm’.

You came upon it suddenly. The walk took you around the periphery of the wood, along a path which was broad and well-established but never seemed to be much used: in my memory’s version of events, at any rate, this vision of heaven was always offered to us in utter seclusion and privacy. For heaven it was: looming into view just when you least expected it, after a series of turns, dips and rises which seemed to be leading you ever deeper into the dark heart of the forest, a nest of redbricked barns and outhouses and, at their centre, an ivy-covered farmhouse of impossible charm. An orchard flanked one side of the house, its trees dappled with yellowing fruit, and we would later discover that behind it, screened from view, was a tiny walled garden, divided up into orderly chessboard squares by gravelled paths and miniature box hedgerows. Best of all, near to the wire fence which marked the boundary between public land and property, there was a little muddied pool where ducks swam and the occasional waddling goose came to drink. On subsequent visits we never failed to bring a brown paper bag filled with stale bread which I would throw at the water or sometimes, in a fit of daring, dangle through the wire until the geese approached and snapped it from my outstretched fingers.

‘This must be the farm you can see from the road,’ said my father, the first time we chanced upon it. ‘The one I go past when I’m driving to work.’

‘I wonder if they have a shop,’ said my mother. ‘I bet it would be cheaper than in the village.’

After that she started using the farm to buy all her eggs and vegetables, and before long this arrangement began to take on a social as well as practical aspect. Showing once again her aptitude for striking up friendships with relative strangers, my mother lost no time in gaining the confidence of Mrs Nuttall, the farmer’s wife, whose lengthy, colourful monologues on the pains and pleasures of the bucolic life meant that a good half hour had to be set aside even for something as seemingly uncomplicated as the purchase of a few potatoes. To offset my boredom on these occasions I was introduced to a farmhand called Harry, who would let me follow him around as he went about his duties, sometimes even allowing me to feed the pigs, or to sit aloft on the driver’s seat of a combine harvester. And over the next few months Harry’s guided tours seemed to get longer, more frequent and more elaborate, until I became a familiar figure on the farm, well known to everyone who worked there including Mr Nuttall himself. It was round about this time, too, that my parents decided I was old enough to ride my bicycle unaccompanied along the local roads, and after that I became an even more regular visitor. Sometimes my mother would make me up packets of sandwiches, and I would eat them sitting in the orchard, or by the duckpond, before setting off to explore the buildings by myself; always remembering to take a look at the calves – my favourites among the animals – and to climb the bales of hay stacked at the back of the largest barn, where there was usually any number of lean, sleepy tabby cats to be found. I would lie on the hay beside them, puzzling over the deep mystery of their purr, hypnotized by the impenetrable half-smile which always made me envy them their dreams.

∗

I was in love, at this time, with a girl called Susan Clement, who had the desk next to me at school. Her hair was long and blonde, her eyes were pale blue and I think, in retrospect, that she was fond of me too, but I was never to know for sure because although I passed many weeks, perhaps even months, consumed with longing for her, it would have been easier for me to fly to the moon than to find the right words in which to express my feelings. But I remember vividly the night I woke up to find that she was in bed beside me. The sensation at first was not entirely unfamiliar, for I had shared a bed with Joan earlier that year, when our families went on a camping holiday together: but I had never wanted to touch or be touched by her; had shrunk from the idea, in fact. And yet with Susan, the first thing I knew – almost fainting with the joy of it, the amazing, palpable reality – was that she was touching me, that I was touching her, that we were dovetailed, entangled, coiled like dreamy snakes. It seemed that every part of my body was being touched by every part of her body, that from now on the entire world was to be apprehended only through touch, so that in the musty warmth of my bed, the curtained darkness of my bedroom, we could not but find ourselves starting to writhe gently, every movement, every tiny adjustment creating new waves of pleasure, until finally we were rocking back and forth, cradle-like, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer and had to stop. And no sooner had I stopped than I awoke, alone and desolate.