I've lived here for 23 years. As a young family we were offered the house as a council house and it's the first one we took, basically to get out of my mother's house.

From the day we moved in - we moved here with nothing - and it was Princess Diana's and Charlie's wedding. People were having a party in the street, and they invited us down straight away. They put a chair out for the baby, and I can see him now eating his jelly and stuffing his cakes into his mouth.

I remember the snow storms in 1980/1981. It started to snow and then within an hour or two we had an eight foot snow drift right in the middle of the street.

As it happens, my sister-in-law was heavily pregnant. She lived over the other side, so we decided to bring her over here. I was watching the snooker. Steve Davies was going on for the first televised 147. She was going in to labour, but I managed to watch most of the match.

We had to call an ambulance. They couldn't get up here, so we called the army. Even they couldn't get up here, so we ended up carrying her down to the main road.

In them days we never had central heating. We ran out of coal. They were telling us on the radio to break in to our electric meters and use the 50p pieces.

I decided, when the weather got a bit better, I would catch a bus and see if I could go up my brother's, cos I never had a van then. I wanted to see if he could get me some coal.

I seen a guy driving up the avenue with a coal lorry, so I flagged him down, bought two bags off him, brought them home. I thought I was doing good, but it ended up it was all stones. We got ripped of well and truly.

That was when the kids were little, when it was so cold in here that the windows froze inside with the condensation. We haven't had a winter since like that.