I am standing in front of a Morphy Richards Convector Heater, shivering slightly, as the heater is struggling to have any impact on my freezing cold bedroom. I put on my clothes as quickly as possible, but not without taking pleasure in them – the grey, black and white kilt, the sage-green cardigan knitted for me for Christmas by my Aunty Maud. The cardigan’s delicate pale green hue seems to merge with the frost outside.  The cardigan is winter and the antidote to winter at the same time. It is also a kind of protection, not just against the cold but against all the terrors of childhood.  The days when I wear the sage-green cardigan are bound to be good days; nothing bad can happen, there can be no bullying in the playground, no teasing in the cloakroom, no frightening sums in the arithmetic lesson. On sage-green days my best friend will still be my best friend at going home time, I will not have to do games or gym, I will get through arithmetic without attracting the teacher’s attention, and perhaps be able to write a long story, or paint.

Aunty Maud must have been thinking very hard about me when she chose the sage-green wool. Maud still lived at number 65 Ettingshall Road, the Victorian terraced house where she and my father had grown up. The house was hard work – lots of tiled floors to polish, an outside lavatory and just one cold tap in the kitchen. My cousin Karen and I were convinced the house was haunted. We were sure that the picture in Maud’s bedroom (a copy of Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’) came alive at night and that the ghostly figure jumped out and floated round the room. ‘You’ve been reading too many fairy stories you have’, Maud would say, and would take us to Church with her the next morning in the hope that a burst of stern Anglicanism would banish such fantasies from our childish minds. Even though Maud did not go in for ghost stories, we loved her. We were happy just to be with her, because it was Maud who was the light of our world, and her light was golden and warm and kind.

The cardigan had some of that light knitted into it. But it was even more than that. It reminded me during the long and testing schooldays that there was another world to go back to, an old-fashioned world where I could have tea with my aunts and uncles and Granddad in Aunty Maud’s back room, and feel completely safe. The room was dark and small, and a thick curtain hid the staircase that led up to the ‘haunted’ bedrooms. The table would have a white cloth on it, and brown glass bowls for jelly and evaporated milk. There would be bread and butter, and perhaps ham or Aunty Maud’s home-made brawn. In one dish, there would be spring onions in malt vinegar, in another a few sliced tomatoes. After tea Karen and I would flit between this room, where the adults sat talking in front of the fire, and the front room, or Maud’s bedroom, where we could have adventures.

One day when I was about ten, Aunty Maud came into the front room, and asked us what we were doing. ‘Just playing,’ we said. Maud looked at me half smiling, ‘it’ll soon be time for work, not play for you’. I wondered what she meant, whether she was going to set me to polishing the brightly coloured tiles in the hall, or boiling the pig’s head for the brawn. My mother told me that Aunty Maud knew how to do things like laying the tea table properly because she had been ‘in service’. I wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but I did know it meant being away from home, and lots of hard work. And I knew it was not going to happen to me, because I lived in a bright modern house, had a convector heater in my bedroom, and almost as many outfits (at least four, including my school uniform) as the paper doll on the back page of my Bunty comic. And sometimes my mother pretended I was a princess when she woke me up, and that she was brushing my long golden hair and laying out the ball gown for me to put on. And even though the ‘ball gown’ was woolly and green, when I put it on I knew that unlike Aunty Maud, one day I would go to the ball.

At five I was photographed in my new school uniform: grey tunic, white blouse, red blazer, and a big red bow in my almost white, straight hair. In the picture I am leaning forward towards the camera, with a huge smile on my face. I have just skipped round and round the garden path, chanting ‘I’m going to school’.

All of this joy evaporated quickly when I discovered that in school you had to sit in rows in silence, doing sums. If you got them right, you moved forward in the row. If not you stayed at the back, conspicuous in your shame.

There were PE lessons, where you had to run and jump, and learn difficult games. I longed to sing in the choir, but was not chosen. In the Christmas play, I wanted to be an angel, or Mary, but instead got the part of the sick child. No doubt chosen for this because of my pallor, the dark rings under my eyes. My ‘costume’ was blue and white striped pyjamas and a dark red dressing gown. I felt ashamed again, appearing in front of the whole school in night attire. I only had one line, the last one in the play – ‘It’s the nicest Christmas tree I’ve ever seen’. I thought about the first Christmas I could remember, at my grandparents’ house, and I delivered the line in the loudest voice I could muster.

Monday morning. Betty is hanging out the washing in the garden of her new semi-detached house. The garden is just bare earth, with a flagstone path down one side, next to the clothes line. The house stands in a row of identical semis, their long gardens divided by wire netting fences. At the bottom of the gardens there is open country, even though the new street is not far from the town centre, and already on a bus route. Betty’s little girl, not yet two years old, is standing by the French windows of their living room, nose pressed against the glass, tears rolling down her face.

Betty and her husband Arthur and little daughter have just moved into the house after eighteen months of hell – seven adults and a child living in a small council house – number 99, Hughes Avenue.  Redundancy had brought them back to Wolverhampton, their home town, and they had been living with Betty’s parents and brothers while Arthur looked for work, and somewhere to live. Luckily pattern-makers were in demand and he got a new job quite quickly. Then he found out about a new estate being built on the other side of the town, and went to have a look. Arthur and Betty signed up to buy one of the smaller and cheaper semis, for £1,750. It seemed like a massive sum, and they could not imagine how they would pay it back, but they were desperate to get out of the madness of no. 99.

When they got the keys to the new house they decided that Arthur would move in first to light fires and warm the place up before Betty and the little girl arrived. But Betty could not face another day of listening to her parents and brothers rowing and singing and playing the piano while she tried to get the little one off to sleep. So she jumped into a taxi with her daughter and drove across town to the new house. All they had with them was a small case with their clothes, and the child’s doll and teddy bear. An astonished Arthur walked down the drive to meet them as they got out of the taxi, and Betty fell into his arms, while the little girl kept repeating ‘Lynda’s new house’ as if she was trying to make sense of the sudden change of scene.

The house was freezing cold and they only had orange boxes to sit on, but they were so happy to have their own place. Lynda had learnt to talk early – with so many adults chatting with her all day long this was not surprising – she even knew all the nursery rhymes by heart. But her walking was still a bit wobbly. One night she walked confidently across the room from her mother to her father as they sat perched on the boxes. This seemed to confirm that they had made the right decision. They needed reassurance, because nobody else in their families had ever borrowed money to buy a house.

They settled into a routine. At 7am Arthur and the other men in the street would leave for the factories, with their sandwiches in a knapsack over their shoulders. Betty would stand in the bay window of her new and empty front room with her little girl in her arms, watching them stride down the unmade road. Then she would set about the housework. On Mondays it was washing, of course. The aim was to get it all out on the line as early as possible, and certainly before the other women in the street. Getting the washing out early was a measure of respectability. So on Mondays she laboured over the washing machine in a cloud of steam, and then pushed the clothes through the ringer. It was hard work, made harder by the need to keep an eye on the child at the same time. She had learnt from experience it was no good shutting Lynda in the living room with the fireguard up and her teddy bear and doll and telling her to play nicely. As soon as the door was closed the little girl started to scream, so the only solution was to leave the serving hatch between the two rooms open, so that she could still see her mother and keep up a steady stream of chatter.

When Betty went outside to hang out the washing it was more difficult. Lynda became inconsolable, as if the glass separating her from her mother was an ocean she could not cross. So for the whole of their first year in the new house Monday mornings were a drama, a tragedy. Then Arthur had an idea. They had no money to buy toys for the child, so he had started to make things for her – a stool for her to sit on, and a wooden cot for her doll and teddy. He was planning a dolls’ house for Christmas and had already chosen the house he would model it on – a big detached place, round the corner from their semi. But for now he would make a miniature clothes line for Lynda. It was a great success. The little girl had her own washing to do now, immersing her doll’s clothes in an enamel bowl of soapy water on a stool, while the doll was tossed onto an old groundsheet, neglected. Then she had to hang the washing out, with clothes pegs, just like Mommy.