walcot parade

This is walcot parade and number twelve and thirteen were the staff quarters which came free with the night porter job at the beaufort hotel at the end of walcot street and I had a room on the top floor and that first summer of heat the whole street would shimmer and warp with the heat on the hot tarmac and the windows would be thrown open along the street and you could smell the food from the fast food restaurants across the road and the onions frying mixed with the petrol and hot rubber from the london road and the horns blowing and sometimes the crash from a car shooting the lights below and then the fire engines across cleveland bridge screeching and clanging out of the station when the nurses from the royal united hospital had burned the toast and triggered the alarms again and some times something worse and we would climb up onto the hot tiles and smell and hear and feel the city as it sank from the heat of an august day to the warmth and regret of an august night and we would eat pizza and drink the cheap red wine and look out over the city as the lights came on and the traffic never stopped below us and the cars lost their colours as we did lit now only by the neon lights from below and the girls would walk along the parade and never looked up and the drunk thrown out of the curfew opposite high stepping and reeling against the traffic and I would pull you close to feel your heat and and still the city promised more from the paling golden stones and the shadows darkening along the parade and the heat now gone in that summer that was so very hot and long ago and recent and past and present again when the winter sun warms the stones of the facades of the houses on walcot parade where we used to live and never knew.