A Street I Could Find With My Eyes Closed

Model answer: If you were to blindfold me and set me down anywhere in Gül Sokak, I could find my way home by sound and smell alone. The morning begins at the corner bakery, where the first trays of warm bread are being carried out just as the shutters of the greengrocer's rattle upwards. By seven, the street smells of yeast and diesel and wet stone, a combination that no perfume could ever imitate and that I would recognise anywhere. Halfway along, there is a crooked plane tree that nobody has ever dared to trim. Its roots have lifted the pavement into small hills, and generations of children, myself included, have learnt to ride bicycles by wobbling over them. Beneath its branches sits Mr Hasan, who repairs shoes in a booth barely wider than a wardrobe, and who will, if you stand still long enough, tell you the entire history of every family on the street. What strikes me, now that I live in a city where I barely know my neighbours, is how much the street taught me without ever seeming to. I learnt to greet people before I understood why it mattered; I learnt that a shop could be a meeting place; and I learnt that being known by others is a kind of shelter. Nothing there is grand, and the buildings are tired and slightly crooked. Yet whenever I return, the street opens its arms and says, without a single word, that I still belong.