“As the train rolled through the countryside, so lush and green, and into the sprawling suburbs of south London, I stared around at all the strangeness: the narrow little “terraced” houses all in rows of brick and chimneypots, the tiny back gardens with clotheslines and garden sheds, the little cars all on the wrong side of the road – it was all so delightfully foreign, and exotic. My first lesson that the rest of the world really was more different than I knew or imagined.”
