The Street Where It Was Still Then

I got lost on purpose, the way you do in a new city with an hour to kill. The old quarter behind the cathedral is a knot of lanes, and I took the narrowest one because it curved invitingly.

The curve straightened into a street I can still walk in my head. Cobbles, but that is normal there. Coal smoke, which is not — a low, sweetish reek I know from my grandfather's village. Enamel advertising signs bolted to brick: brands of soap and tobacco in a typeface nobody has used in my lifetime. Laundry strung between third-floor windows. A bicycle with a rod brake leaning unlocked against a lamp post whose lamp was a glass flame burning yellow in daylight.

People, too, a dozen of them, dressed heavily and plainly, wool and caps. And this is what moved it from quaint to wrong: they stared at me. All of them. Not hostile — arrested, the way a room goes quiet when a stranger enters. A woman gathered a child closer as I passed. Their shoes made a different sound on the stones than mine.

I walked the length of the street, maybe ten minutes, spine prickling, feeling hugely tall and loud and brightly coloured. At the far end there was an archway; through it, a delivery scooter shot past, and the noise of the present arrived like water. I turned around and the archway framed an ordinary alley: wheelie bins, satellite dishes, a parking sign.

At the hotel I traced my route on the map. The lane I entered exists. The street it becomes does not — there is a 1970s shopping precinct in that block, and an archive photo caption online informed me the old commercial row there was 'cleared in 1968.'

I still have coal smoke in the coat I wore. I have not washed it. That is my whole evidence, and I know how it sounds.