Duncan Gammie, from Hitchin

I am from Hitchin, in Hertfordshire. I left at eighteen, the morning after my mother died, and almost everything I have done since started there.

The town

Market town north of London, a church too big for it, a river you would miss if you blinked, and the kind of Saturday night that produces split knuckles. I was good at trouble. I was in a cell the morning I found out my mother had been dead for two days, and her last clear words to me had been to get out of that town and go somewhere they have to ask you your name.

It took me longer than it should have to listen.

What she left

A name on a piece of paper and an address in Monmouthshire. The name was Lance O’Leary, who had eleven acres of vines in Wales and no interest whatsoever in giving an eighteen year old from Hitchin a job. He told me my mother had wanted me educated. He wrote to somebody he knew. That is the reason I ended up on a plane instead of in a vineyard, and the reason I am writing this from New York.

I went back for the first time years later and the cell was still there, and the light in it still does not go off. There is a chapter about that.

A note on the name

There is another Duncan Gammie in Hitchin, and he is a very good sommelier who runs a wine shop there. We are not the same person and we are not related. If you came looking for The Wee Vinoteca, you want him. If you came looking for the memoir about the drunk tank and the spit cup, you want me.

I am the one in New York who does not drink.