Take four standard-issue local authority tower blocks. Stick them together: two up, two down. Plant a soccer-pitch sized garden at one side and an identical block beyond it. Place the two blocks beside a gently curving lake, not forgetting to put a four-lane highway between the buildings and the water. Add wind, cover with a generous topping of snow and set aside to await economic regeneration.
This was how the buildings we live in were put up, about 20 years ago. They're full now, with 1,000 flats, let's say 3,000 people, and at least 1,500 cars. The garage is under the garden. It has several regions in its depths, each named, following the "theming" of the whole complex, after classical composers. There's "A" for Albinoni, inevitably, and also Bach, Dvorak, Elgar and Faur?. Our Toyota lives in section "C" for Copland.
Classical music plays in the garage all day, as it does in the lift, the corridors and even the hot tub. It's cold down there, too, the disrespectful wind poking rudely in through entrances and exits. And it's smelly, often reeking with the sickly odour of the garbage that hurtles down the rubbish chutes into the lines of underground dumpsters. Over the music, the cold, the wind and the smell, the telephone trills constantly. One of us is summoning our car and a garageman will bring it out, like a groom leading a horse from its stable, as we saunter downstairs. "Regents Park ge-RAJ, how may I help you?" he shouts into the receiver.
His name is Antonio and he's one of 13 men working down here. He wears a boiler suit, flap-down hat and gloves against the winter cold. He has severe glasses and square gappy teeth. Amazingly, he's always smiling. "Hey, how yer doin', favourite people?" he shouts as we grumpily shuffle in the morning. "How yer doin', little man?" he asks my son, who grasps my hand tightly and whispers up, "I think he likes me."
I think how very American Antonio is in his resolute cheerfulness, doing a dull, uncomfortable and repetitive job. He makes it his business to make people smile, he says. "Helping with the happiness of others-it's my humanitarian duty." He was "born and raised," as the phrase goes here, right in the neighbourhood. But his father is Liberian, his mother Jamaican. So he's got two names: Antonio, after the doctor who delivered him, Bilal for his African, Muslim side. That having two worlds, the immigrant beneath the indigenous, is very American too.
He finds us amusing, and laughs at our English English with its sprinkling of Italian phrases, most of them mercifully untranslatable. He's fascinated by castles, and I wonder if his vision of Britain is like one of those picture maps where castles the size of counties rest on the green sward and men of war patrol the sea. "What's it like growing up in England?" he asks me one day.
For some reason I'm completely flummoxed by this. His question catapults me back into my childhood, a place I seldom wish to revisit. The pale light of East Anglia seems to flood into the dark garage, streaming out of the endless sky. There's no getting away from it. It's a light that works its way into the soul's corners, making curmudgeonly thinkers, reformers, rebels and puritans of those it spies upon. It fastened on me, a schoolgirl in a flimsy cotton dress (squares in diamonds, diamonds in squares), green blazer and boater with an elastic chin strap. I see myself walking to school in long white socks (the more patterns the better) and brown sandals, thighs a prey to the nippy April air and (this is the 1970s) the nosy looks of builders down holes in the road. There I am in the egg-whitey translucence of early morning, standing with several hundred other girls in the big hall, singing, without a trace of sarcasm-or even, in my case, of self-awareness-our school song: "He who would val-i-ant be, let him come hith-er." And over the whole scene spreads the bitter jealousy I felt for my sister all my childhood, a corrosive oil slick that took years to recede and can even now slide back to haunt me. "If this is growing up," I used to say to myself at the time, burying it all deep under The Herries Chronicles and The Prisoner of Zenda, "I can do without it."
"Well," I say to Antonio, as the vision melts, "Well-it's a very small country." Which makes him laugh. To those from its ex-colonies, Britain can still loom very large indeed.
Of course, like the taxi-driver who's not just a taxi-driver but a summertime jet-ski rental business owner, or a teacher from Pakistan, Antonio doesn't only work in the garage. At night this 30-year-old married man with a young son becomes a pre-med student at a local university. In two years time he'll be done with shunting cars. He's planning to go to medical school and become a doctor. He's living the American dream, and who's to say it won't pan out? But the real point, I think to myself as soon as I turn the car up the ramp and emerge, blinking, into the above-ground, is not so much that you can realise the American dream, but that you can dream it. For someone like myself, perfectionist, ambitious and too prone-in the words of my school anthem-to "beset myself round with dismal stories," a bit of whatever it is that Antonio has, would go a long way. And I wish I had it.
But at my back I always hear a wearily cynical voice-perhaps it's that of Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy and one of the secular saints of my hometown. "Dream on," it's saying, as an English person would ironically say it. "Dream on...."
