When Finn first arrived at the beginning of the 1980s, London appealed to him aesthetically. In 1982 it was in many ways still a city of the late 1940s and early 50s. The red telephone kiosks, the open-backed double-decker buses, the decor in the Underground, the very street names and shopfronts and the yellow glow that lights the city at night as the slick black cabs rush back and forth appealed to Finn’s bright Canadian eyes, previously accustomed to the new and somewhat shiny cities of North America, as old-fashioned and from another time. There was something about the men in their long wool overcoats and scarves, the women in hats with their lipsticked mouths and cold cheeks, that allowed Finn to fantasise he was in a different era, an extended Brief Encounter of sorts.

A lot of that had changed. The city was being forced very quickly out of the past and into some warped view of the future. The Americans were marching in, their businesses transforming the West End. But the grime still remained and, in fact, the amount of litter and street rubbish was increasing. The tops and sides of the buildings were still filthy with lay¬ers of London air pollution. Finn found something intensely human about the dirt and debris as it blew through the Underground tunnels while the trains pulled in and out. The squalor spoke of a kind of sluttishness beneath the terse exterior of Britain; to Finn it suggested histories he had not begun to imagine. He did not want London to be clean because cleanliness could mean newness and sterility and he liked to think there was still something seething in London, something left unexplained and unknown. He even liked to subscribe to the popular myth from abroad that British people do not bathe; this suggested a depravity and lasciviousness that mainstream British culture seemed to be trying very hard to deny.

Mary, on the other hand, did not notice the dirt. She had grown up with it; she would only notice if it disappeared.  Mary bathed often enough — Finn exempted her from his theories - and she loved the way that the distinctive, diesel smell of London would engulf her when she arrived back having been away. In the winter that smell was sharp and hoary, in the summer heavy and muggy: it evoked immediate and kind memories of her childhood and a London which she believed in her heart to be one of the great cities of the world. And, Mary believed, a multi-cultural city, although it did not like publicly to admit to that. A city full of people from everywhere imaginable, all sorts of faces and food. The milieu in which Mary lived was varied and rich, an environ¬ment where all previous notions of Englishness should have been rendered obsolete but, of course, were not. The English clung to some indefinable past, a past of their own imagining, of an Englishness or, in some cases, Britishness that somehow excluded India, Ireland, the West Indies, Canada, Africa, Australia, despite the fact that those places have long been a part of Britain’s sociological and political map. The past of an individual is a dangerous, imagined minefield; the past of a nation a battle zone. Not even an English woman like Mary, much more politically sophisticated than her parents, could escape from that.