Until we moved to Hilton Drive when I was seven, it was a case of reading Fairyland Tales, an upmarket booklet for teenies, then progressing to Rainbow. At Hilton, with other children as companions, I didn’t read so much, though being that bit older, I did read the Children’s Newspaper when Dad started buying it for me. The Hilton houses, newly built when we moved there, had a patch of grass at the back (a drying green shared by the four tenants) and a small garden each to grow vegetables. In our block there was usually at least one girl of my own age, probably more, and two or three boys, so the drying green was too small for playing boisterous games. Hilton Drive, however, although a busy thoroughfare now, was relatively traffic free then; only the odd cart or car could be seen and my father’s motorbike, which he kept in the cellar when he wasn’t using it. I can’t say where the coal was kept (I wish I had written this before my memory grew so temperamental); in a separate bunker, I would think.
