Once upon a life: Caryl Phillips

Newly graduated from university, Caryl Phillips headed to Edinburgh to find the peace to write, exploring its Georgian streets with wonder. Until his dole payments were stopped, and things began to look grim…

Caryl Phillips
The Observer, Sunday 17 October 2010

Caryl Phillips at home in New York.
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Observer


Shortly after my 21st birthday I jumped on a train to Edinburgh. I took with me bundles of files stuffed with hastily scribbled notes and as many books as I could carry. I was a student at Oxford and finals were looming, but I could neither concentrate in the feverish atmosphere of the faculty library, nor relax in the claustrophobic dankness of the college beer cellar. Everybody seemed to be coming apart at the seams, myself included. Edinburgh suggested peace and a retreat of some kind. The previous summer I'd worked as a theatrical stagehand at the International Festival where, apart from sweeping the stage before every performance, my principal responsibility was to hand Dorothy Tutin her sword as she made her breezy entrance in Antony and Cleopatra. Beyond the glamour of the theatre, I met an art student who became my girlfriend. My flight to Edinburgh was both a temporary escape from university and a return journey to her.

I worked in Edinburgh Central Library, but spent a great deal of time gazing out of the window at people caught up in the daily business of their lives. I soon pushed to one side my notes and stopped ordering English literature books from the stacks. I now found myself filling out request forms for contemporary plays and novels. I'd already decided I wanted to be a writer and so, perhaps unwisely, I refocused my attention. I eventually returned to an Oxford that I felt detached from, and went through the motions of dressing formally for examinations I now regarded as obstacles to be negotiated before attempting to claim my future. Having completed finals, and cleared my room of the accumulated detritus of three years as an undergraduate, I immediately took the train back to Scotland.

Officially, I was now an unemployed resident of Edinburgh and I was learning to survive on a fortnightly dole cheque. At the end of my girlfriend's street was Arthur's Seat, the main peak of a group of rugged hills which make up most of Holyrood Park. Beneath its summit the steep cliffs of Salisbury Crags form a dramatic border, and around their perimeter runs the Radical Road, a track that was paved in the early 19th century. Two or three times a week I would walk the road and marvel at the view of this Georgian masterpiece of a city which I had begun to explore.
Read the rest at The Observer.