I stand at the top of the stairs in house at Burford Gardens, where I've lived since my evacuation from Liverpool. I live with Mrs Horton, with "My Auntie" as I call her. My mother stands at the bottom of the stairs.

'Come on Jud!' She says, 'I'm your Mam  and you’re coming with me!'

“Then you shan’t have him!' says Mrs Horton, drawing herself up to her full height.

'Nobody in this world can stand between me and my son or stop a mother taking her own child!' shouts my Mam.

Behind me stands the woman I've known as a mother: I'm desperately torn between the two women. I guess a psychiatrist would say it must have had an effect upon my later development. In the end, blood proves to be thicker than water, and I walk, rather reluctantly, I must say, downstairs into my Mam's arms.

I walk away with a stranger, looking over my shoulder at the woman I love and who has loved me with tears in my eyes, my little brown case in my hand.

I am seven years old.

Forty-five years later I sit in what had been the sitting room of the Horton's house. It is now converted into tearooms for customers visiting the nurseries and gardens. I drink tea and eat cakes in the room where forty-five years earlier I sat and listened to the wireless as Mr Churchill gave his radio reports on the progress of the war. I walk to the bottom of the stairs where that dramatic confrontation had taken place all those years ago. All that is missing is the Westminster Chimes. The room is full of ghosts.

Twenty-one Teme Street  [2]
Dragging my wooden wheelbarrow loaded with luggage and with Mam burdened down with suitcases and cardboard boxes, we move into 21 Teme Street. It is so different from the quietness of the gardens. Teme Street is the busiest thoroughfare in town and a constant stream of horses and carts and motor cars move past the windows. Miss Maddocks is a seamstress, and a middle aged version of Keyhole Kate. She's a very sharp nose and mousy brown hair drawn back over her large forehead. She wears a pair of glasses with pebble lenses. The property is a narrow terraced house full of ticking clocks in the middle of a row of shops. We have a single room, which is the one upstairs overlooking the street and Bloom's the gentleman's outfitters opposite. We can see Mr Bloom standing proprietorially in the doorway to the shop. Outside on hooks fastened to the fascia are overcoats and fisherman's waders, long John underpants and big black boots.

The narrow yard at the back of the house contains a miniature version of a South American rain forest. Growing there in a strip of soil down the length of one wall, is a wild profusion of malodorous green ferns and waxy looking plants. The whole mass of mouldy green vegetation is covered with a box shaped cage of wire netting. ' To keep the birds out,' explains Miss Maddocks. The smell of rotting vegetation is overpowering. The whole yard floor is besmeared with bird shit, which is perhaps a telling indicator of the contempt with which her avian enemies regarded the whole shambles.

Why she imagines any bird will venture down into this depressing vegetative skid row is beyond me. This dark, sunless slot of space is only fit for furry things that scurry silently at night.

Neither of us is happy in that damp, cold, depressing house. What little we see of Miss Maddocks through the jungle of aspidistra leaves is unedifying to say the least.

Boraston Mill

One day my Mam: announced that we're moving to Boraston to live with an old lady called Diana Morris in an old mill.

Diana Morris is a small, rotund, rosy-cheeked little countrywoman with broad peasant features and a wide medieval looking nose. She's like a figure from a Breugal painting. Her eyes a watery blue beneath the white bushy eyebrows. Her thick white hair is pulled back tightly to the nape of her neck and tied with a ribbon. She wears a voluminous white smock over a black ankle-length skirt. Her shoes are flat and made from black leather. Her appearance is that of a solid countrywoman, a stereotypical image of a farmer's wife. She's a spinster and has never lain with a man. She seldom speaks and when she does, it is very slowly with a pronounced Worcestershire burr. Her eyes are continually screwed up, which may indicate a need for spectacles, but they shine with an amiable glow. Her smile comes slowly to reveal yellow, broken teeth with many gaps.

The way we live at Boraston Mill is very primitive. Like most houses in the countryside at that time, there's no electricity or gas. The house is lit with paraffin oil lamps and candles. The lamp that illuminates the living room at the mill is pretty, with a cerulean blue ceramic base and a tall elegant tapering glass globe. Trimming the wick is an important ritual, which Diana always reserves for herself. A badly maintained wick will result in black smoke with the subsequent blackening of the globe. The lamp gives out a yellow light, which combines with the wavering flames from the wood burning in the grate, to set up an ever-changing panorama of flickering shadows on the ancient whitewashed walls When it's time to go to bed, the old lady picks up the lamp and guides us up the wooden stairs to the small landing. There is a candlestick complete with snuffer in my bedroom. Mam tucks me into bed then snuffs out the candle. I lie there alone listening to the wind whistling in the eaves.

There is no bath in the house. The ubiquitous tin bath in front of the fire is the normal method of bathing. There is a bowl and tin jug in the bedroom. There are no taps in the house or running water. Water is obtained from a well ten yards down the track that leads to the house.

Most people's idea of a well is of the old wishing-well design, with a round brick structure topped by a small conical canopy. There is a winding handle to which is attached a rope with a bucket on the end.

Not so our well. The casual observer wouldn't notice the well at all, for it looks no more than an insignificant roadside puddle. It is no more than a small earthen alcove in the bank - a pool of brackish water topped with a greenish scum across which insects called waterboatmen scull out their brief lives. In one swift movement, you sweep your hand across the surface of the water to remove the slime and plunge in the tin jug or saucepan immediately.

The toilet arrangements are equally primitive. There is no flushing toilet, for there's no water. At the back of the mill runs the Cornbrook. Perched on the edge of the cinder pathway and protruding over the stream is a flimsy wooden structure which one enters at ones peril. There is a wooden plank with an irregular round hole sawn in the middle. There is no lid on the seat. Eight feet below the water of the Cornbrook gurgles and splashes over the stones

Once as she's guiding us upstairs late one night, Dinah tells us the last man hanged in Worcestershire for sheep stealing came from Boraston Mill, early in the nineteenth century

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Edie Richards from number 52 Eton Street.
[2] 21 Teme Street has now been converted into a Wine Bar.
[3] My Mam: was 38 at this time.
[4] Knighton School is now a private residence.
[5] I've Got Sixpence. More lyrics found using the wonders of the Internet.
I simply typed in "I've Got Sixpence" into my search engine - and Hey Presto