The Voyage Home

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

163–64

text excerpt

This hunger for music has never been assuaged.  Even street music puts a spell upon my senses, if not upon my mind.  I can recall sitting in my office during a period at the Ministry of Labour when our department was housed in a squalid and dirty block of buildings opposite Dartmouth Street, near St James’s Park Underground Station. To Broadway, below my window, street musicians frequently made their way, with fiddle, trumpet, and three-stringed double bass.  As soon as their music began to float up, dustladen from the street, my attention to the Dictionary of Occupations wilted, like cut flowers in the sun, and I sat there, hypnotized, a lump in my throat, and often tears in my eyes, much to the consternation and bewilderment of any colleague who might enter the room to find me in that nostalgic condition; nostalgic for I knew not what.  

excerpt from 'The Voyage Home' pp. 163–64 (149 words)

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1447598185929