Sensation by Colin Graham: A compact, echoing and suggestive memoir

There is a moment in Colin Graham ’s memoir, Sensation, when I found myself looking in the mirror of shared memory. Graham is trying on the uniform of his new school, pins scratching, the collar too tight, the angles of childhood straitened by conformities that soon become habits.

I remember the moment as I remember much of the rest of the book’s first phases; growing up in east Belfast , the “melancholy menace”, the morning bus, the milk rounds, Graham with his father, I with my uncle. These early morning transits had something of the infernal about them even then; the diesel engine guttering beneath the cab like an underground fire, the rattling gearstick Charon’s tiller, the city withdrawn, watching.