Eleven years ago it was different. When I did as Max told me, rang Mum up and said I’d been asked not to come back to GUP in October, there was at first a dreadful silence. Then tears. I could hear her gulping and whimpering and I don’t really know why I didn’t just put the receiver down and run away and hide. Dad came on the line and said I had broken my mother’s heart and he didn’t know why people had children, they wouldn’t if they had any idea what it would be like, just misery and bitterness and despair from the cradle to the—well, he couldn’t say “the grave,” so he left the sentence hanging in the air. They told me to phone them again when they had had time to digest what I had said and were less upset. So I did, the next day, and Mum said she supposed I had better come home, there was no point in staying in London if I wasn’t going to college. I told her Max had ideas about that and, plunging right in at the deep end, asked her whether she’d have my cat if I had to leave London. Another silence, then a sort of grudging assent, cut short by an explosion from Dad in the background, a bellow roughly decipherable as “I’m not having her bloody mog here.” I thought I could safely leave that for the time being. After all, I still had old Mrs. Fisherton’s, I still had a home for Mabel, and it looked as if I would at least for August and September.

Silver and I always knew our time on the roofs must necessarily be short-lived, an adventure that would last for months rather than years, and would one day soon have to be abandoned to the pressures of the final stage of growing up. I had taken it for granted when I first met him that he and Wim had been roof climbing for years and it was a surprise to discover that it was only in the previous July that he had been up there for the first time. A day is so much longer when you’re twenty than when you’re thirty, eight months is a lifetime, yet here’s a paradox: nights pass fast in early youth, they go much more slowly for me now. When I sat on the rooftop with Silver and we talked and smoked and picnicked and talked and talked, the hours flew away. That summer it seemed that no sooner had the last red faded from the great wide open sky than the pale cold light of dawn was coming. And all the time we knew it must end, that there would be only so many long days and short swift nights before the practical world took over and we had to live real life.