| NOTES |
I had not seen my mother and grandmother since disappearing without warning two and a half years earlier. Although reassured to some extent by the cool tone of the couple of letters I had received since making contact again, I was still a little apprehensive about the possibility of a horribly emotional welcome, whether angry or tearful. As I entered the front garden of 4 Connaught Road, I found the first evidence of my absence. I had made some attempt to maintain the garden as my father had left it, with flower beds and the tamarisk tree in the centre, although I had certainly not kept it very tidy. My mother had reduced it to an all-over severely mown lawn. |
| I knocked on the door and it seemed a long time before it opened, as though my mother was having second thoughts about the reunion. As she let me in, she was in the tense, tight‑lipped, slightly‑leaning‑backwards mode that she always adopted when trying to distance herself from any situation. However, as soon as I entered the living room, my grandmother launched straight into "why, oh why did you do it?" etc, and that started my mother off. The two of them threw the emotional hand-wringing book at me, broken 'earts alternating with unbridled 'appiness. |
| At a point where things were going very much the 'appiness way, I suddenly found myself announcing that I had wonderful news for them. "I've decided not to go back" I said. "I'm going to stay at home with you, for your sakes". The treacly torrent ceased abruptly as the two two of then exchanged alarmed glances in silence. "Stay 'ere?" My mother's tone was rather as though I'd told her I was going in for a sex‑change operation. "You can't stay 'ere!" affirmed my grandmother, sounding incredulous as well as indignant. |
| On a nostalgic tour of Barnet in 2006 I was atonished to find that those apple trees at 4 Connaught Road were still flourishing (they can be seen from the park at the back). | As a matter of fact, staying there was just about the last thing I wanted to do, but I had been thinking about things on the journey down. Returning to Leeds would have meant having nowhere to go after leaving work on the Tuesday except, horror of horrors, St George's Crypt. I don't know if it occurred to me that I could have dossed down at the factory. After all, I had the keys. If the thought crossed my mind I must have dismissed it. Then there were the police. If they were going to suspect me of every act of vandalism in Leeds and possibly arrest me for things I hadn't done (which, admittedly, would have made up for some of the things I'd got away with), life was going to be pretty miserable. Actually, I didn't come to a decision until the very moment that I blurted out the news that I intended to stay. There was an impulse to take advantage of the storm of sentimentality, and I added the bit about it being for their sakes to fit in with the mood. I had, of course, badly misread the situation. In my two and a half years' absence, I had forgotten the fact that the faster the torrent of sentimentality, the shallower it was. Anyway, I managed, with much hard work, to assure them that I had picked up many valuable managerial skills in Leeds and would soon get a good job in Barnet and my own flat. They agreed that it would be very useful to have me living fairly nearby, as there was so much 'man's work' to be done in the house and garden. (The back garden had, indeed, been treated just as brutally as the front, apart from the apple trees, which were the result of my having thrown apple cores into the garden in the '50s.) |
| So here I was, back at the same council house in Connaught Road, where nothing at all had changed (except for the minimalizing of the gardens), back in my same old childhood bed, back to High Barnet, all as though the Grand Tour and Leeds had never happened. I felt sorry enough to have left Leeds, but much more so to have disappeared from the rats 'n' rags cellar. Although I had been getting increasingly depressed by the place and anxious to escape from it, I now felt that I had performed a senseless act of self-mutilation in cutting myself off from it on a mere panic-induced impulse. A large part of this feeling was guilt at the problems and bewilderment my sudden disappearance was going to cause at the factory. It was certainly going to be hard for old Rowling (for whom I had developed quite a liking) to find a replacement, bearing in mind that I had been doing what had previously been the work of four or five people. The only way to avoid becoming thoroughly miserable about it was to switch off all memories of my time in the rats 'n' rags cellar. In fact, I hardly thought about it again at all, until I came to write these memoirs. |