An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall of the room where I work. It's a picture, dating from 1946, of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born. The house is rather peculiar - a three-storied gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tile hat. 'The past is a foreign country,' goes the famous opening sentence of L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between, 'they do things differently there.' But the photograph tells me to invert this idea: it reminds me that it's my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.

LRB 7 October 1982 | PDF Download