The Southeast Branch of the Society of Authors was trying its hand at a pop-up bookshop for members in the Tunbridge Wells area.
It wasn’t until I showed up at the mighty shopping mall that was going to be housing the shop, that I realised it was squatting on the site of my first holiday job as a scenery painter for the town’s summer repertory company. My mother had seen an article about the place in the local paper while I was at school and had managed to wangle me a temporary apprenticeship.
I must have been 15 because I hadn’t yet been presented with a scooter for my sixteenth birthday and had to catch the bus in each day from the village where my parents lived to a back-street laundry that had been converted into a theatre workshop.
I was apprenticed to an entertaining but world-weary Scottish designer, who would disappear from the workshop virtually as soon as the pubs opened, leaving me to happily munch my sandwiches amongst the scenery, props and costumes, dreaming of becoming a future Shakespeare, Wilde, Coward, Stoppard, or whoever was holding my imagination at the time, until closing time.
Forty-five years later I was back, inside the shopping mall that had crushed all the small streets of the area, including that one with the converted laundry, watching thousands of shoppers bustling around on top of my past. At the entrance to the mall a woman in costume was handing out flyers for the Christmas pantomime being staged at the same theatre I had helped paint scenery for.