The Lost Properties of Love - Sophie Ratcliffe

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I was eight, I moved schools, and my father started to take me there on the Tube. The connection from West Finchley was a slow one, as the line divided just before it, at Mill Hill East – so you had to wait that bit longer for the train. The station was in the opposite direction to the woods, off the main road, hidden down a slope, after the Chinese takeaway and the post office and Dick’s the Grocers, and what was then a chemist but would soon become a video rental store. When my father went into Lovesay & Son to get his paper, I would look up at the pale blue lettering, wondering at the name. Lovesay. Inside, I would stand at the shelves, looking at the rows of sweets. Opal Fruits and Frazzles and Parma Violets became muddled in my mind with the idea of amorous declarations and headlines. A collection of objects hung on the opposite wall, suspended in air like my old Ladybird Key Words book. Watering can. Trowel. Funnel. Bucket.

      Mr Lovesay didn’t seem to have a son. He wore a brown shop coat and walked back and forth between the rear of the shop and the counter. Whenever he sold something, he would tear off a small numbered ticket from a perforated pad. I wondered if love was something you could tear, as well as something you could say.

      Every morning, I would have my small travel pass ready to show at the gate where nobody ever stood. We would walk over the latticed bridge and wait for the train, at the far end, past the wooden waiting room, looking up at the sign for NEXT TRAIN. The 1959 stock shuffled out of an invisible siding, confirming itself as via Bank or via Charing Cross, terminating at Morden. This was a world of strange words. Via. No smoking. The sliding doors would open and I would take a seat in the nearly empty carriage, feeling the prickly blue-green tartan moquette on the back of my bare legs, and looking at the lined wood floor.

      The sign for Lovesay & Son is still there, its pale blue fading into white, like the veins on a porcelain wrist. Dick’s the Grocers has long gone, turned into a salon that announces its treatments in a list to the right of the door: Manicure & Pedicure, Cavitation Weight Loss, Gel & Acrylic Nails, Teeth Whitening, Eyebrow Shaping, Hair Extensions, IPL Hair Removal, Skin Rejuvenation, Microdermabrasion, Botox and Fillers, Massage, Facial, Waxing. And the Northern Line still has the same two branches going south into London that never meet. We wanted to get onto the other branch, so we always had to go too far to get to where we needed to, and go back out of town again. The first stop of the journey took just moments, a slowish grind past some shrubbery and an arched bridge, but then the train stopped again for ages at Finchley Central, a junction station that looked like a Swiss lodge, all frilled wooden panels and bottle green paintwork. Finally we sped up on our way to East Finchley (birthplace of Jerry Springer), with its deco staircases, glazed in glass tubes. Then we were flying again, past endless allotments, and the rainbow colours of electric cables and the blind backs of houses with their sheds at the bottom of the garden, through a small tunnel, and the Tube really became the Tube, with that familiar rick-rack sound, plummeting down under Highgate Hill towards Archway, Kentish Town and Tufnell Park.

      The carriage got crowded around about Highgate, and then my father stood above me in his suit, holding on to one of the fibreglass globes on bendy springs, swaying until the crush of bodies in the carriage held him still. He was one of many commuters crammed into this train in the spring of 1983. They all looked the same – the million Mr Averages switching on for work. George Michael wore blue jeans rolled up at the ankle and white trainers and a black leather jacket. They wore navy mackintoshes and pinstriped suits. Looking up at the sea of grey Denby-pressed fabric, I reached out to steady myself on the wrong legs.

      Camden was a crush of bodies moving this way and that through the various tunnels, taking the ‘via Bank’ people onwards to Charing Cross, allowing those who were journeying on the two branches of the northern bit of the Northern Line to swap over. But the platform to Edgware and Colindale was always quieter and the train was nearly empty. By 8 a.m. we were heading back out to the suburbs up the other branch, making what on the map looked like exactly the same journey, but backwards, and five centimetres lower down.

      There were no escalators at Belsize Park. The lifts were closed with expanding iron doors, like a concertina cage, and they juddered their way up to the surface. Once the lift broke and we made our way up the steps, circling into the same grey rain and red brick of Haverstock Hill – the place where the not-suburban people lived.

      Much of that journey is now, for me, not lost, but trapped in time. Just one of the ways that time tends to trap us. Everything about that journey was regularised too. There is something about the world of commuting that washes a sense of difference out of things and people. Commuters may look the same. Every day, they inhabit the same space. They follow the same timetable. They ride the same train. People, like trains, were regular beings. They did not transform, or mutate. They did not go changing.

      Wishing for difference was one of my favourite childhood activities. On the way to school each day, I read on the train. I’d like to think my father did. But the rows of his books on the bookshelf at home – The Day of the Triffids, Rumpole, The Great Railway Bazaar, Homage to Catalonia – don’t look like the sort of things you’d carry on the Tube in the morning. If I strain my memory hard, perhaps he is holding a newspaper, or a last-minute sheaf of figures. As I sat there on my itchy seat, I read in envy of other people’s hair and clothes, their houses and their relatives, their food and their wallpaper. I read because other people’s halls were invariably bigger than ours. Other people’s houses had multiple floors. Other people’s mothers wore sunglasses. Other people’s families took me out for lunch to restaurants that served puddings called The Outrageous. Other people’s fathers carried mobile phones.

      Even when they were doing nothing, other people’s families did it better than mine. On a Saturday afternoon, the Bakers stretched out on a chaise longue or lay on the floor reading newspapers. The Shermans faced each other across the shag pile in articulated padded loungers, drinking frozen orange juice from individual snack trays. The Greens had a swimming pool and a petting zoo. Life was an Argos catalogue of alternative possibilities, and envy was my hobby and my salvation. I was an expert in it.

      Going through East Finchley, I read on – for other, better homes and better stories. Ballet Shoes on the Brompton Road. Windsor Gardens. Avonlea. Tara. Kansas. Oz. I read of The Ordinary Princess and Minnie the Minx. I read of Peter and Mollie and the Wishing-Chair with its bulbous legs and temperamental little red wings. I loved the shiny blue hardback cover, Mollie’s hairband and ponytail combo, and the spiked violet creams that did for the Ho-ho Wizard. Most of all, I loved the scene where Mollie and Peter’s mother takes a liking to their flying chair and brings it into the house. Then Mollie, pretty Mollie, who never does anything out of turn, goes for the Blyton equivalent of an ASBO. She thinks up the deliberately naughty idea of vandalising it in order to get it back, taking the sewing scissors to the cushion, spilling ink on the upholstery and kicking the legs until it is ruined.

      I wanted to vandalise their chair too – not to help them, but because I wanted what they had and I couldn’t have it. Peter and Mollie had an Emergency Exit. If I were them, I could fly out of the window, out of the semi-detached world. I read on. Addicted to the kind of novels in which exceptionally ordinary children are ‘discovered’ by directors and thrust upon the stage, I stared at the man who got on the train at Kentish Town, who could have been a casting agent. If I stared hard enough, perhaps my story would transform itself into something else, something extraordinary.

      There is something childlike in memory, which makes me conceive of my father as a perpetual commuter. Though the act of remembering him is sudden (it lands with violence, like a carriage lurching off the rails), the image of him is steady in my mind. And the picture that unfolds is predictable, regular, moving according to a pattern I have long established.

      We are walking out of the station. He holds my schoolbag in one hand and encloses my hand in his other. His are large and blunt-fingered, with freckled backs, rough from fixing cars, but soft to touch. Over five days, he explains to me exactly how a carburettor works. I listen, with half an ear, trying to understand, but also just following the rise and fall of his voice.

      When he dropped me at the gates, he handed over my satchel, and turned to smile and wave. He was an enigma to me, as he floated off to an office in a place called Elephant and

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