Burnley

Burnley serves as a deliberately uncertain point of origin in the novel: the hero is made a northerner from the town, while the narrator’s later reflections connect it to childhood memory and to the records of his former life. The town links invented identity to personal history, even as the narrator questions how closely the two should be joined.

An Invented Origin

The narrator admits that there was no clear reason for making the hero a northerner from Burnley. The name had entered his mind through parcels bearing the destination, which he handled during a Christmas job at the King’s Cross sorting office. In retrospect, he understands the choice as a small reluctance to depict himself exactly as he was. Burnley is therefore not presented as a carefully chosen biographical setting; it is an incidental place-name that allows the fictional hero’s identity to approach, but not simply coincide with, the narrator’s own.

A Soundtrack of Memory

Later, Charlotte Street in London brings Burnley back to the narrator through music. The duty drivers and cipher clerks working in the building gathered around a loud gramophone and their enthusiasm for colliery brass bands. Their music travelled up through warped, broken floorboards, carrying the sound of a brass-band contest into the offices. That year, Fairey Aviation had won the Open Championship again. The same music gives the place different meanings to Dalby and the narrator: it evokes Horse Guards Parade for Dalby, but makes the narrator feel transported back to Burnley. The town thus recurs not as a scene of action, but as a remembered atmosphere summoned by sound.

Burnley in the Rewritten Record

Burnley also marks the documentary traces of the narrator’s former identity. When his papers are changed, the process reaches beyond a new passport: birth and marriage certificates, licences, and other records are replaced, while the old documents are destroyed. The narrator recalls that his picture appeared in the Burnley Daily Gazette in July 1939 after he won the fifth-form mathematics prize; the following year, the whole sixth form appeared in a class photograph. Those issues could no longer be found at the newspaper’s offices or at the library in Colindale, a sign of how thoroughly the reclassification process had cleared away the past. Burnley consequently holds two versions of the narrator’s connection to place: a childhood identity preserved in local records, and a fictional origin chosen as a partial disguise.