The boat that plies between Jason’s Wharf and Camden Lock came smoothly out from under the bridge below me and I felt the same sort of envy of the girl who steered it, she looked so free and yet so responsible. But she took the boat and all its passengers under the café and into the tunnel mouth and I no longer wanted to be her because I knew how it would be for me, the low, slimy, moss-covered tunnel walls, the rocking boat on the black water, and the darkness but for a pinpoint of light ahead. Claustrophobics need not experience a place to know how it will be. Their imaginations do that and more.

I walked along Warwick Avenue, looking at, and by now hearing, the traffic rushing across the concrete flyover that scars the blue sky, the green spaces and the pretty houses. The Westway. It was on the A–Z but not on my father’s old map. I stood on the Harrow Road and saw that I hadn’t a hope of getting across it. There were barriers on the pavement to stop anyone crossing. To go to Paddington, or even as I later learned, to get to the southern bit of the Edgware Road, you had to go under it. The underpasses were marked in my A–Z. I even found one of them, its entrance close to St. Mary’s Church and Paddington Green, but rather than go inside, I’d have risked my life dodging the cars tearing along the Westway at seventy miles an hour.

Standing there, I could see that there might be one way. There might be one route to Paddington that avoided the subterranean: the canal. An arm of it branched off here, its waters must have been under my feet. That was how I came to retrace my steps and after several failed attempts to make the descent, went into the little garden and down the winding shrubbery path to the canal bank. Even so, I still had to pass under the bridge, under the road I had been on minutes before, but it wasn’t dark or enclosed, I was soon out on the other side where the boats were and the gardens and a boat owner’s dog sitting on a red-painted roof above the nameplate that said CICERO.