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Radcliffe

Radcliffe, my father told me, was in the Midlands. He was fond of quoting, somewhat sadly, Hilaire Belloc:

When I am living in the Midlands,

That are sodden and unkind,

The great hills of the south country

Come back into my mind.

I liked the sound of the great hills, but had no idea where they were meant to be, and could not remember any in Barnes. The nearest town to Radcliffe was Nottingham - also, I learned, in the Midlands - and my father got a job there as an accountant with a firm that made women's clothes. Bill and Marjorie both worked in Nottingham too, cycling the six miles there and back each day, whereas my father went on the bus. Bill's job was in the packing department at the Nottingham Evening Post, Marjorie's in Barclays Bank in Arkwright Street. It was freezing in winter, she told us, and she got terrible chilblains. But there was an open fire and Eric Wing, the man she later married, put a kettle on at eleven o'clock each morning and dissolved Oxo cubes in boiling water - which, with everything being rationed, was a luxury.

Radcliffe was just a village then. There was a crossroads with a few shops and a church. We lived in Walnut Grove, a stony track winding up from the crossroads. When it rained, little streams snaked down it, with gravel glinting through the water. At the top was a green gate and, beyond it, someone's enormous vegetable garden. We were forbidden to go there, and I thought of it as the garden where Peter Rabbit met Mr McGregor. Our house, Durham House, was halfway up on the left, a foursquare, detached, double-fronted brick house with laurel bushes in front and a long back garden. Next door, in a cottage, lived Miss Haslam, who was an ARCM and gave Rosemary piano lessons. Next door on the other side was a stable belonging to some people called the Greatorexes. Since there was no resident horse, they let Rosemary and me use the hayloft over it as a den. To get in you had to stand on an iron manger and clamber up through a trapdoor. It was a lovely place, smelling of straw and dust. Opposite us were the Richmonds, who had a bay tree in their front garden. When my mother prepared soused herrings for high tea on Saturdays I was sent to ask if we could please have some leaves from it for flavouring. Kind Mr Richmond would pick a sheaf and put them in my hand like a little pack of bright green cards. Apart from the Misses Bloodworth, who lived next door to Miss Haslam and were on bad terms with her and were known to be gossips, that was the entire population of Walnut Grove.

At the bottom of Walnut Grove was a long low shed housing Astell's, the newsagent's and confectioner's, where we bought our sweet ration. Mr Astell was a gaunt, square-jawed, wolfish-looking man, and all he usually had in stock were wine gums. They were shaped to look roughly like fruits, in various cloudy colours, and he kept them in a tall metal canister with a round lid which he would lever off, prior to pouring a meagre tinkling shower into the brass pan of his scales. The sweet ration was four ounces a week and if he went overweight his long fingers would select an errant gum from the scales, toss it back in the tin and clap the lid on, while we watched critically. He almost never had any chocolate in stock - not, anyway, for Rosemary and me - but luckily Marjorie had a boyfriend in the RAF called Chris who would send her bars of chocolate occasionally which we shared. At Astell's we also bought Erinmore Flake for my father's pipe and, using a fraction of our shilling-a-week pocket money, Rizla rolling papers for the cigarettes that Rosemary and I smoked secretly in our den. In the 1940s anyone who was the least bit stylish smoked, so we puffed away in solemn imitation.

The other shops were of less interest. Opposite the end of Walnut Grove was the Co-op where all the family's rations were measured out, and round the corner from Astell's was a baker's which sold cream buns. Up the village street was Smith's the chemist, a legendary shop because a previous Mr Smith had invented a hand cream called Cremolia and sold it to Boots for, it was whispered, unimaginable riches. You can still buy it and it is, so far as I know, the only famous thing to have come out of Radcliffe. But for Rosemary and me Radcliffe was heaven. The nights were so quiet, after Barnes and the bombs, that we found it hard to get to sleep, and the days were full of freedom. Radcliffe really does have red cliffs, as its name promises, and they were our playground. We would turn left out of Walnut Grove, walk up the road, climb a stile - the first stile we had seen in our lives - and cross a field to the cliff-top path. To clamber down the cliff face we clung to bushes and got footholds on tree roots and slipped and slithered the last bit, and there at the bottom was the River Trent with a weir stretching across it. It was a rather dank and gloomy place, with overhanging trees and lots of nettles, but the weir put everything else out of your head. The air was thick with the din of it, and you could stand on a concrete ledge, looking out over the foaming roar, so close that the shallow water by the bank, as clear as a plate of glass, was racing past just inches from your toes. Our cousins, Barbara and Margaret, Eva and Eddie's children, came to stay for a week and we tried to introduce them to the pleasures of cliff climbing. But they were terrified and we felt very superior. When Rosemary and I were grown up, and had children of our own, we wondered whatever our parents had been thinking of, allowing us such freedom. But I fancy that they, like the rest of us, just eased up, getting out of London, and were content to let things go.

Not that they relaxed, exactly. My father grew vegetables for us in the back garden, his part in the Dig for Victory campaign. The garden at Barnes had been small, and mainly lawn, or, later, mainly air-raid shelter. This one was huge by comparison and had extensive brick-built sheds and outhouses and fruit trees - a damson near the kitchen and several apples. I think my father was pleased and proud that he could grow so much. He had a cucumber frame, an adventurous thing for those days. I had never seen one and was fascinated by the idea of vegetables having a special room for themselves out of doors. He also joined the local Home Guard unit. They wore battle dress and had rifles and did manoeuvres down by the railway line. I remember watching them taking up a defensive position, a line of men, all, I suppose, ex-soldiers, sighting along their rifle barrels. It was serious, and the Dad's Army idea of the Home Guard popularised in the 1960s has always seemed to me insulting - a cheap laugh for a pampered, unthreatened generation.

My mother worked all the time - cooked, cleaned, catered. In the evenings she knitted sweaters and socks for Bill, me and my father. Until my late teens the only socks I wore were ones she had knitted, and usually darned as well. Buying socks in a shop would have seemed ridiculous, and it never occurred to me that anyone did. For darning she had a wooden toadstool, painted pink (though most of the paint was worn off), which she slipped under the place to be darned. She washed our clothes each Monday in the stone-paved scullery where there was a copper with a coke fire underneath and a wooden 'copper-stick', pale and worn from use, and wrinkled, like your hand when you've left it too long in water, which was for pushing the clothes down in the copper. For drying she used a mangle, a big iron frame, a bit like a printing press, with a screw at the top for adjusting the tension and two wooden rollers turned by an iron wheel at the side. The wet clothes were fed in at the back and came out from between the rollers flat as cardboard while water from them splashed down a wooden sluice at the front into a bucket. Ironing happened later in the week, in the afternoons, filling the kitchen with a lovely toasty smell. The house was kept spotless, every polishable surface polished. The dining-room sideboard had an array of silver objects on show - cake stands, salvers, fruit dishes - and they were always sparkling. Marjorie helped with this, but otherwise it was taken for granted by everyone, my mother included, that housework was her department. The idea that my father should help with the housework would have struck her as out of the course of nature.

She was a wonderful cook and provider, and eked out food so that despite rationing we never went hungry. Some of the best things were from leftovers, especially bubble and squeak and scraps of meat minced for shepherd's pie. The mincer was a big hand-cranked machine that had to be screwed to a table-edge before use. The meat went into the metal cup at the top and the little worms of mince wriggled out at the bottom. Then the mincer had to be taken apart and all its screws and cutters scrubbed clean. As a treat she would make toffee, using black treacle and pouring the mix into a greased baking tray. When it had hardened she broke it up with a hammer, and because of the greased tray you always got a slight taste of margarine when you first put a piece in your mouth. It was delicious. Rosemary and I had no memory of what food had been like before the war. We used to goggle at the old biscuit tins my mother kept knitting wool in, and the custard creams, rich teas or shortbreads pictured there seemed like other-world fantasies, not real food at all. I used...