In 1956 from the age of two years until three and a half years my parents and I lived with my grandmother, Mary or Molly Ledden (née Hill) at 84B Burlington Street. This was a flat in a block of flats in the Scotland road area of Liverpool, one of the poorest parts of the city.

My early memories are of waiting for my mother to come home from her morning shift at Jacob’s biscuit factory, watching out for her through iron bar railings from a concrete landing.

I didn’t realise that my surroundings were grim at that age and it was all I knew - dangerous flights of concrete steps up to the first floor landing, brick flats on every side, tarmac and concrete everywhere.

Henley street children

Every child needs a mystery in their life - mine was the fascinating wall chute and pull swivel door where my parents put the rubbish, which disappeared from view down a chute into a rubbish collecting cellar which was emptied by the dustcart every week.

It was like magic when the rubbish disappeared.

Another source of wonder was the big chimney of Tate and Lyle's sugar factory and the disturbing scene I once witnessed of two mothers having a fight and shouting at each other on a landing of the flats opposite... culminating when “one mummy threw a boot”.

This became a legend in our family and I was in awe and fear of the strange pink ventilation tube installed in the flats opposite, which appeared above the roof. It looked alive and like a finger pointing to the sky.

I remember the cold in the bathroom and that there was never any hot water from the tap. We used to wash in the tiny back kitchen which had a curtain across it.

The flat was supposed to have a hot water system, but it had never worked and the Corporation had never sent anyone to repair it. I remember there were always clothes soaking in the bath, and I never had a bath.

The highlight of the week was a Sunday when everyone went to Mass and in the evening my dad's brothers, Uncle Chris, Uncle John and Uncle Frank would come round and everyone would drink a little and play cards - poker for pennies and halfpennies which each would put in the centre of the table.

I remember they taught me how to play and I remember that my eyes would water with the heat of the coal fire and the smoke from Woodbines.

On a Sunday afternoon there was also a custom that everyone would do a “turn”: Sing a song, dance, or recite a poem. The person performing would emerge from the curtain of the back kitchen as if onto a stage and do their turn.

My Aunty Theresa, Dad’s youngest sister, would sweep me up in her arms and we would come from behind the curtain and she would sing a Beverley Sisters song “Sisters, Sisters” with me trying to sing the words with her and shake our index finger at the Audience when we sang “oh, no sir” indicating that “nothing could come between us”, as the song went.

Growing up

When I was three and a half my mother had saved enough to put a deposit on a terraced house, 59 Henley St, Seaforth, Liverpool 21.

There my family lived until I was eight years old - myself, my mum, dad and two brothers who were born while we lived there.

There were no gardens, just back entries and the fewest of weak weeds on the “bombdy”, a site at the top of our street where a bomb had obliterated a house.

We had great fun once jumping on an old mattress, but I caught a flea, over which there was great consternation. I had to strip, all my clothes and I were put into a bowl of water and I was told not to play there again.

Henley street was a street like “Coronation St”. I remember the cobbles being tarmacked over.

The back entry was made very unpleasant by lumps of dog dirt, but the trails of slime fascinated me - I did not know they were made by slugs or snails. In fact I never saw any slug or snail there. I thought these trails were the trails of fairies (because they glistened like mother of pearl).

I played on my roller skates and skipped with all the other children in the street using a big rope. We had a game called 'under the moon, and over the stars' where one would run under the rope from one direction and everyone would shout “Under the Moon” and jump over from the other side to the shout of “Over the Stars”.

One of my favourite games was when we saw a “sugar baby” or “fairy” floating through the air and we would jump up trying to catch them - these were dandelion seeds, but I didn't then know that, or know what a dandelion looked like.

We had a park with a few swings, a roundabout and a small area of grass. The first and only worm I saw here was cut in half by a little boy.
I did not like this and he did it to show us how the head could live on and wriggle. Soil then was not soil, but dirt - it was brown and there were no flowers.

The first flower I had contact with was a plastic one - mum brought home a plastic red rose given away free with Daz washing powder.

Eventually mum achieved a vase of plastic roses and I liked them; I had no experience of real flowers.

The makers of Daz also gave away a set of plastic place mats showing the Squares in London: Trafalgar, Leicester, Kensington, Covent Garden and St James's Square. These places seemed very grand and far away - I wondered about them.

To Oswestry

When I was four my mother was pregnant with my brother. So when he was born I went to stay with my nan, Ethel "Hetty" Smith (née Hughes), and Grandad and Aunty Joan who lived at 2, Council Houses, Park Hall, Oswestry.

Ethel (Hetty) Hughes and children

This was a whole new world! It was an end house, next to a football field; the edges were wild with long waving grasses, where I saw (and caught) butterflies and moths.

I heard a cockerel crow in the mornings, birds sang, and my nan had a garden with flowers and coloured stones and glass globes (which she liked to place among the flowers).

It was very different to my life in Liverpool, much more colourful. I loved it and felt the warmth and glow of it. That is why I love the countryside - because I knew the difference at an early age, what life was like without it and with it.

My nan’s house was stuffed with ornaments, with bright polished brasses, a glass biscuit jar which always had chocolate biscuits in, a snarling tiger’s head, brass tigers, elephant bells, lots of books, spiders’ webs on the window and an old barometer on the window ledge, on which was written “From goblins and ghoulies and long leggetty beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us!”

My nan had a dog, a Scottie dog. Dinky liked her tummy tickled and didn't’t like the postman or even the sound of the word. She would jump up at the window barking ferociously if a postman dared approach the house or was said to be approaching.

My nan also had a cupboard, in which she kept her hats. She always wore a hat to town, and there in the darkness, among the hats, the cat Geena curled up and slept.

The table at my nan’s was opposite the fire and the big grate in the living room. It was always laid with a chenille cloth and there was always a loaf of white uncut bread, covered with a tea towel, on a wooden bread board.

The Goodwin’s fresh butter and the pot of homemade jam stood ready for when her grandchildren visited.

My nan would make a pot of boiling tea, then cover it with a hand-crocheted cosy, cut the bread and make jam sandwiches dripping with blackcurrants... all within a few minutes of our arrival.

My nan had a dangerous way of cutting the bread. She would lean over the breadboard, lock the large, crusty, white loaf firmly in a strangle hold under her arm and slice firmly and quickly inwards and up towards her underarm. When the slice was cut it would fall over the knife onto the breadboard. The jam and bread was always delicious.

The Showgirl

My nan’s early past in still something of a mystery. We know she was a stage performer in her youth (before she married in 1920), appearing at Oswestry's Coney Green Theatre and at seaside theatres and showhalls, such as Barmouth.

Her stage name was "Hetty Denvers" and she had a large Indian chief in full feather headdress tattoo on the top of her right arm. I heard that she had this done when she was eighteen. She loved Indians, tigers, adventure and danger.

Mum said that Nanny had two great trunks of stage clothes. She could still high kick in her sixties.

I remember that my Mum and Aunty Joan would ask Nanny if she could still cock her leg over the chair, and Nanny used to kick high over the back of a chair and they would all laugh. I wasn't sure what this was all about when I was little.

Once when I was young I pulled out some photographs from a draw at Nanny's. There was one photo of a very big man with top hat and tails and carrying a cane. I asked who he was, "Fatty Arbuckle" she said, "and I knew him!" I always thought Fatty Arbuckle was a fictitious fat man, but there he was larger than life!

On the move

Once (while still in Liverpool) when my Dad came home from work, he saw me sitting on the pavement by the gutter, staring into the grid. He asked me what I was doing and I told him I wondered where it went to.

He muttered to himself as he lifted me up from the edge of the pavement and carried me inside the house, "I wasn't sure about moving, well that settles it. Children ought to have more to wonder at than gutters", and soon we were going to move to the countryside, to Wootton near Oswestry.

When I see sheep or animals being transported in lorries with slits along the side, I know what it feels like to travel like that and look out through the slits.

My Grandad, Gilbert Smith worked at Oswestry Smithfield and he got hold of one of the animal lorries to transport us and our furniture to a little cottage at Wootton.

My Mum travelled in the front with my baby brother, Stuart on her knee. My Dad and Grandad also travelled in the front - my Dad helped to navigate, while my Grandad drove (he never took a driving test, in those days it wasn't necessary).

Meanwhile, my nan, my brother Paul and I were in the back of the lorry, in the dark when the big ramp door was closed.

I was quite frightened and excited in the back, with the furniture around us and the big carpet rolled up.

There was one armchair put in the centre of the van for my nan who was 66 at the time, but the chair slid about as the lorry lurched or went around corners.

Nan said that I or my brother could sit on the chair, but neither of us did. We hung onto the furniture, some of which was tied to the sides by rope. It was scary in the dark with bumping, moving furniture for four hours.

The lorry was slow, the roads windy and narrow, then you had to go through the streets of Chester and the back streets of Wrexham to reach Oswestry.

We were dazed and dazzled and dizzy by the time we got out and I remember the smell of the exhaust and petrol was strong and made me feel sick.