David Storey

Flight Into Camden

1960. Vintage, 2000.

Down the side of the park stretched a row of beautiful terraces, white and glistening against the cold blue sky. Howarth explained their architectural uniqueness as we walked. But I didn't believe in the Nash terraces. They seemed only a facade to the seething ugliness behind

The Yorkshire miner's daughter has come to live in Camden Town with her married lover, 'a fall that neither of us knew how to end.' Her despairing view of their relationship is reflected in her perception of the wintry landscape.

The lake had the same shallow artificiality as the zoo, stretching itself in its low hollow between the trees. The emptiness was a meagre, polite desolation, anxious not to be distressing. It seemed merely an absence of buildings, bare and thin with conceding too much. It was a big, empty park, sighing with the wind, its polite hand over its aching heart