Goldsmiths’ art college

Goldsmiths’ art college is the setting for Edwina’s first encounter with Ollie Treadaway, remembered decades later as the instant she fell in love with him. The college appears through a single vivid scene rather than as a developed setting: its significance lies in the meeting it preserves and the family history that begins there.

The 1957 Encounter

Edwina first saw Ollie in the college canteen in 1957. She was wearing a grey polo-neck jersey and black-and-white houndstooth pedal pushers; Ollie, a nineteen-year-old student, was bundled into a navy Guernsey knitted by his mother. As he waited in the queue for egg and chips, he explained that the jumper was boiling hot and pulled it over his head. Edwina remembers the glimpse of his pale skin as the moment she fell in love.

Ollie at Goldsmiths

Ollie was known as the golden boy of Goldsmiths’ art college: wiry, curly-haired, Irish, and, in Edwina’s recollection, poised perpetually on the brink of manhood. His self-presentation and background gave him an air of glamour. He came from a landowning dynasty, while stories circulated of an estate in decline, drink, and fallen women. The college canteen encounter brings that distant, romantic aura into an ordinary student scene of a queue, a hot woollen jumper, and a meal.

A Place Preserved in Memory

Goldsmiths’ art college matters in the narrative as the point of origin for Edwina’s attachment to Ollie. Recalled almost sixty years later, the meeting is organized around precise details of clothing, food, and gesture, making the beginning of love concrete rather than abstract. The scene’s brevity also marks the limits of what the location represents: the novel offers no broader account of the college, but returns to it as the place where Edwina’s family story first took shape.