Budding talent

One of the many pleasures of blogging is the discoveries to which it can give rise. Last November, just before I went for my cataract surgery, I did a post about Bonfire Night as I remembered it from childhood.

In her comment, my next-to-youngest sister, who comments under the name of PolkaDot, promised to send me a scan of some sketches she had made one Bonfire Night when I was at university. This she soon did and I so enjoyed them that she sent me other drawings she had done as homework while studying art for O-Level.

Now one of the things I’ve never been able to hide is that the gene for artistic talent, handed down from our mother in particular, completely passed me by. My three younger sisters all showed considerable artistic talent, two of them studying it for A-Level and one (my next sister) at degree level. PolkaDot’s talent and inclination was particularly for architecture, which she went on to study at university.

I can’t draw a straight line without a ruler, and, sketched by my hand, a cow looks very like a dog, and vice-versa. I've been told many times that, with time and patience, most people can be taught to draw, but I still maintain I have the drawing equivalent of tone-deafness, which means I've always been filled with admiration for those who can draw and paint.

Apart from the two Bonfire Night sketches, the drawings my sister sent me are mainly of our childhood home and its setting on the edge of the Lancashire moors and I’m sure they will give you as much pleasure as they have given me. Remember when you look at them that she was 15 or 16 years old at the time she drew them and captured so well the people and places I knew and loved. 

My mother watching the bonfire flames

Looking down past the farm towards our cottage

Our kitchen - the heart of the home

Bury Fold, Darwen - 17th century farmhouse

The quiet little village where I grew up

Christmas at the Co-op

During the last few quiet weeks, I’ve been watching more TV than usual to accompany my knitting. This has meant rather greater exposure to Christmas advertising than I might have wished, which in turn led me to ponder some of the differences between Christmas now and the Christmases of my childhood.

Until I was nearly thirteen our house was a TV-free zone, which meant my only exposure to advertising in the home before then was in the pages of newspapers and magazines, neither of which featured largely in my childhood reading habits. Even on our trips to town, there weren’t really any adverts for toys or games on display, which must have spared our parents much of the pre-Christmas pestering today’s parents seem to have to endure.

Instead we girls relied on one very special Saturday to inform ourselves about the latest toys and games and decide what suggestions or requests we might include in our annual letter to Father Christmas. That Saturday was the day in late autumn when our local Co-operative Society opened its Toy Fair in the big meeting-room on the first floor of its premises in the main street of the east Lancashire cotton-town where I was born.

Not our Co-op, but it gives a good idea of the style

Almost trembling with excitement, my younger sisters and I would be taken by our parents by bus into town, where we would join the queue for admittance into this Aladdin’s cave of childish treasure. There we would spend a blissful hour or two wandering round the displays to find the special one or two items we felt we might be able to ask Father Christmas to bring us. Even then we had a very clear understanding that we couldn't ask for much, but that if we were modest in our requests, we would probably find them satisfied on Christmas morning.

The other great treat of that day was the visit to Father Christmas’s grotto in a side-room off the main hall, with the inevitable question as to whether we had been good, and the invitation to whisper in his ear what we would like him to bring us for Christmas. Then he would hand each of us a small gift as an earnest of the treats to come and we would go home, tired but happy, to start counting down the days to Christmas.

Soon afterwards would come the letters to Father Christmas, written out in our very best handwriting, with no spelling mistakes or crossings-out, which we would leave on the mantelpiece for our father to put up the chimney before he went to bed.

The other ritual which was inexorably linked with the pre-Christmas period as I remember it was the divi. For my overseas readers I should explain that each time one shopped at any Co-operative Society department, one was given a receipt, which was carefully put away safely until it was time toclaim the dividend or divi – our share of the profits of the Society. Twice a year out came the receipts, which were carefully pasted (usually by us children) onto a special claim form, bearing our member’s share number, and even more carefully totalled up by our mother, so that we knew how much divi we could expect.

By the time I was in my teens I was very aware that this bonus went at least part of the way towards paying for the presents which would appear in the stockings we left at the end of our beds on Christmas Eve. By then too I was long aware that our parents helped Father Christmas out by delivering those same presents, which had been carefully hidden in the bottom of the wardrobe in their bedroom, but for the sake of my two youngest sisters my lips were sealed. 

The idea of piling presents round the tree didn’t feature at all in my childhood, since our tree was tiny and stood on a table in our small living-room, well out of harm’s way. It’s a pity Simon didn't do the same….

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Images via Google

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November...

…gunpowder, treason and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot...

  

Between fifty and sixty years ago, when I was a child growing up in a small Lancashire village, November 5^th, more commonly known in Britain as Bonfire or Guy Fawkes Night,  was probably the most important date in the calendar after Christmas, Easter and birthdays. From early October the local village shops would display fireworks for sale and as the month drew on, we would start to hear the occasional ‘banger’ being set off early by local boys.

Towards the end of the month, our parents would give my sisters and me ten shillings between us (50 pence now, but worth a great deal more back then) to buy our annual selection of fireworks before the shops ran out of our favourites. Oh, the agony of selection – almost as bad as that of choosing our Saturday sweets!  Catherine wheels, Roman candles, rockets, fountains,  and of course the essential handheld sparklers, even the names transport me straight back to childhood and the growing excitement as Bonfire Night came closer.

But there was much more to Bonfire Night than fireworks. Above all there was the bonfire to be built, in a grassy hollow on the hillside above our mother’s laboriously terraced garden. One October Saturday our father would take us down to the local woods, where we would collect fallen branches and tie them in bundles to be dragged home up the steep field above the woods. Later he helped us to build the bonfire, making sure it would burn well and not collapse too soon, and adding to it any odds and ends of burnable material which had been accumulating in the coal cellar for months.

Then there was the guy to be made, a task which was ours alone. An old shirt or jumper or jacket of our father’s or grandfather’s, together with a pair of ancient trousers or overalls and some holey socks would be stuffed with hay, straw or newspaper until we had an approximation of a human figure, with a bag for a head, and, if we were lucky, an old cap or hat on top.

We were never allowed to go out begging for ‘Pennies for the guy’ as more fortunate schoolmates sometimes did. Instead our guy stayed safe and dry indoors until the time came for him to be fixed firmly on top of the bonfire. In the meantime our mother would be busy too, making hard, dark and beautifully brittle treacle toffee to be sucked as we watched the bonfire burn and the fireworks go off.

Finally the day itself would dawn, with fervent prayers from even the most sceptical child that the weather would stay dry and not be too windy. No weekend communal bonfires and firework displays back then. November 5^th was Bonfire Night and only the most appalling of weather would change that.

Our small family bonfire was always lit early in the evening, straight after high tea, and we would gather round it with the neighbouring children and watch our father set off the fireworks one by one, while we traced fiery patterns in the night air with our sparklers and ruined our teeth with treacle toffee. When we were older we would sometimes put potatoes in the embers and leave them to bake while we were busy elsewhere.

For our small family bonfire wasn't the only one we attended each November 5^th. Our farmer neighbours had an old, open-fronted quarry on their land and in it their large extended family would build the biggest bonfire I have ever seen. Once our small bonfire was reduced to glowing embers we children would all decamp to the quarry for a spectacular blaze. Adventurous youngsters would scale the lower reaches of the quarry sides to set off fireworks from vantage points above the enormous bonfire, while the rest of us toasted ourselves and watched the excitement.

Eventually even this fire would die down, which was the signal for everyone to head back to the farmhouse kitchen for meat and potato pie cooked in enormous enamel bowls and shared with the multitude. Finally we would walk down the short lane from the farm to our cottage and fall into bed, exhausted, replete and happy, to dream of flames and fireworks and fun.

This November 5^th I shall be otherwise occupied, but on the drive to and from the hospital, I shall while away the miles with Bonfire Night reminiscences and maybe even a piece or two of treacle toffee.

Images via Google

Christmas Day with a difference

One winter morning I opened the front door of my childhood home, stepped out onto the garden path and fell flat on my back. It was Christmas Day 1962, I was sixteen, and though we didn't know it at the time, this was the beginning of one of the longest and hardest winters of the twentieth century in Britain.

The rain that had been falling as my sister and I came home from our first ever Christmas Eve party had frozen solid overnight, coating paths, trees and, more significantly, power lines with ice. We had woken to find ourselves without electricity and my mother had sent me to the neighbouring farm to investigate and, if necessary, to report the power cut, as we had no phone at home. Picking myself up, I did as I had been asked and gingerly made my way home with the news  that we had company in our misfortune, as the entire village was without power.

Our cottage was the second from the right, with my grandfather living in the end cottage next door

Thus began one of the most memorable and enjoyable Christmases of my life. Not only had it been heralded by my very first kiss under the mistletoe at that Christmas Eve party, but it would continue to provide experiences which are still vivid in my memory after fifty years.

Luckily the weather was clear, cold and sunny, so that the only immediate problem was how we were going to cook our Christmas dinner. With the electric stove out of action, everything had to be cooked in or on the coke-fired Rayburn range which was our only source of hot water. Christmas dinner was later than usual, but the chicken (no turkey for us back then) was mouth-wateringly tender and delicious after its long, slow roasting.

It was only when the last mouthful had been eaten and the last plate washed and dried that the real difference of this particular Christmas Day came home to us. No electricity meant no lights, no TV or radio for the Queen’s Speech, no Christmas specials from our favourite TV stars – in fact, no ready-made entertainment of any kind.

Instead, as the short winter daylight dimmed towards evening, out came the candles in jam-jars, the playing cards and board games, and we settled down round the kitchen table for a mammoth session of games until it was time for tea.

In the Lancashire of my youth, Christmas tea was always a highlight of the day. Not for us a desultory pecking at a sandwich or a mince-pie because we felt too full for anything else. Instead the table would be laden with ham sandwiches and salad, with jelly, trifle, mince-pies and Christmas cake and of course a large pot of tea. How we managed to do justice to it all after so much Christmas dinner I will never know, but do justice we did. Eating by candlelight made it even more special that year, and in my mind’s eye I can still see my parents and grandfather and my sisters round the table in that gentle glow.

After the tea-things had been washed up, it was back to the games until it was time for an essential part of all my childhood Christmases – singing carols round the candle-lit Christmas tree in our little front room. The tree was minuscule, a two-foot tall fir which was dug up from the garden each year and brought indoors to stand on a small table, ready to receive our much-loved collection of delicate glass ornaments – baubles and bells and two fragile glass birds with long silky tails.

Tiny birthday-cake candles stood in star-shaped holders clipped to the ends of the branches, which were draped with long strands of tinsel: red, blue, green, purple, gold and silver – no tastefully colour-co-ordinated Christmas trees for us! The kitchen and front room were hung with home-made paper chains and the tiny, flickering candle-flames on the tree were reflected as an infinity of points of light by the tinsel and ornaments – a moment of sheer beauty which tugs at my heart-strings even now.

Finally we made our way to bed, still by candlelight, and woke next morning to that special light which told us immediately that it had snowed in the night, snow which wouldn't completely disappear in many places for almost three months. But that is another story…..

A childhood on foot

Since I retired, the alarm function of my bedside clock has had less and less use and so it was a shock to the system this morning to find that I must inadvertently have pressed the alarm button last night, with the result that it roused me far too early from a deep and satisfying sleep. With no pressing need to get out of my warm and comfortable bed (these late October mornings are much too chilly for my liking and I’m going to church this evening) I drifted into that pleasurable state between waking and sleeping which allows all sorts of odd memories to rise to the surface of the mind.

To my surprise I found myself retracing my childhood walk to school, a small church primary school in a little village on the western fringes of the Pennines in Lancashire. In my mind’s eye I climbed the slope from our cottage to the stile into the field in which our neighbouring farmer grazed his cows. Once through the stile (a swing-gate, not a ladder stile) I walked along the footpath by the stone wall which bordered the field, until I reached the stile at the far end leading into the centre of the village.

Post Office and shop

From the stile I turned right for a short distance until the lane met the main road through the village. Ahead of me, across the road, stood the village post-office and shop, next door to The Victoria Arms, one of the three village pubs, the other two being strung out along the road through our small, but very straggling community. Turning left at the junction, I passed on my left the second of our village shops, run throughout my childhood by two unmarried sisters, Bessie and Marion.

It was in this shop that my sisters and I bought our small weekly allowance of sweets and the choice was always fraught. For 3 (old) pence we could buy two ounces of a wide variety of tooth-rotting goodies, such as pear-drops or mint imperials, aniseed balls or dolly mixtures, jelly babies or humbugs. I could go on….

Alternatively we could opt for a number of individually priced items like liquorice straps or sherbet dabs or even (perish the thought nowadays) a packet of sweet cigarettes which would allow us to mimic our elders’ behaviour before eating the chewy little sticks one by one.

Once past the shop I left the village centre behind and continued along the road for a few hundred yards to the next group of buildings.  All but one were houses, but the exception also played a central role in our lives back then. It was the Sunday School building for the Congregational chapel we belonged to and was the scene of many of the most enjoyable events of my childhood.

Its large main room acted as a village hall and there we went regularly to chapel socials and concerts and of course the annual Christmas party, with the obligatory visit of Father Christmas and his tantalisingly bulging sack of presents. It was there that my sisters and I learned to perform in the concerts and played our part in the work involved in providing a sit-down tea for a hundred or more people. It was there that we learned dances like the valeta, the Gay Gordons, the Dashing White Sergeant and of course the inevitable hokey-cokey and where I realised that, as far as dancing is concerned, I was born with two left feet. 

Down the hill to school

Beyond the Sunday School building was a walk of another few hundred yards, before I reached the next pub, The Rock Inn, and turned left down the lane to our little two-teacher school. According to the wizardry of the path function on Google Earth, that was a walk of about three-quarters of a mile each way, which we did on our own and on foot, winter and summer, through rain, wind, snow and even sunshine, until we left that school and graduated to the luxury of a bus journey to the grammar school in the neighbouring town.

I’m sure that there must have been many times in bad weather when we wished we didn’t have to make that walk twice a day, but it had its compensations. The details of our daily route, the individual buildings we passed, the people we met and the wonderful distant views from the hillside road, are deeply embedded in my memory and in my heart in a way I don’t think any car journey would allow and I’m glad of it. Perhaps I ought to set my alarm by mistake more often…. 

All images other than the first via Google. Some very old and of poor quality when magnified

Going to the baths

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. A few posts ago, when I was writing about one of my favourite films, my ageing memory let me down yet again and I had to go online to remind myself of the names of the cinemas of my childhood. As I googled my home-town and the links came up, I was immediately distracted by a reference to the town’s swimming-baths and the memories came flooding back.

Sadly, the link led to a newspaper account of the almost complete demolition of the building I knew so well, to make way for the construction of a multi-million pound leisure centre which opened 2 years ago. Only the central part of the façade, with its pillars and steps, was retained to provide a link with the past.

The impressive facade of the baths

The baths which formed an unforgettable part of my childhood and teenage years were built in the early 1930s, at the height of the Depression, with the majority of manual labour carried out as part of an unemployment scheme, financially assisted by the government (present-day governments take note?)  The style was definitely influenced by Art Deco and the building was among the most noteworthy in our small industrial town. The baths were opened in 1933 by the future King George VI and were intended to be used as swimming facilities in the summer months, and as an assembly and dance hall throughout the winter.

The 'big plunge' drained ready for covering

The large pool (always known to us as the ‘big plunge’) would be drained in the autumn and covered with wooden flooring, providing a very spacious area for dancing and other activities. I still vividly remember the New Year’s Eve dance that I attended with my next sister and how I left early and went home (walking at least half the 4 mile distance in the dark for lack of buses) because I was tired of sitting like a wallflower at the edge of the dance floor. It’s not always fun being a teenager.....

By the end of the 1960s life and leisure had changed so much that the dance-hall became financially unviable and after that the baths offered year-round swimming. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and the memories that really stick in my mind are of swimming there and, above all, of the weekly trips to the baths from my village primary school each summer term for those all-important swimming lessons.

My primary school was a small, two-teacher, Church of England school with about 50 pupils. Only the juniors in the ‘Big Class’ were eligible to go swimming, the infants in the ‘Little Class’ being considered too young. My memory isn’t at its clearest at this point, but I think Wednesday was our swimming afternoon, and as soon as lunch was over we got ready to catch the bus into town, accompanied by our teacher.

Primary school children always used the small pool or ‘plunge’ (I’m not sure I’d even heard the use of the word pool for swimming back then) and we only graduated to the big plunge when we went to senior school and could more or less swim. I freely admit to not having enjoyed the swimming lessons very much, mainly because I’m so short-sighted that without my glasses I couldn’t recognise the children in the pool with me, let alone see the teacher properly. 

There is  something more than a little disconcerting in trying to learn something when the world around you is a blur and when you only get to practice during one term out of three. However I persevered, and though I’m still a poor swimmer, I did manage to swim my ‘breadth’ and get the first certificate and was making good progress towards swimming my ‘length’ by the time I left for senior school in 1957.

The part of the afternoon I remember with most pleasure was after we had dried and dressed ourselves and were waiting for the bus home. We always had at least a quarter of an hour to wait for the bus and so our teacher would take us into the market hall next to the bus station and let us buy broken biscuits at the grocery stall there.

Those were the days when butter, sugar and biscuits were all sold loose and weighed out to order and the inevitable broken biscuits would be put to one side and sold cheaply by the two or four ounces to schoolchildren. As soon as we were given our bags, we would look eagerly to see what this week’s mixture consisted of and feel distinctly disappointed if there were too many rich tea biscuits and not enough custard creams. J

Some years later, in the early 1960s, I found myself behind that same grocery counter, weighing out the loose foodstuffs as I earned extra pocket money by working at a Saturday job. By then I could swim as well as I was ever going to and even enjoyed going swimming out of school, though my surrounding were still a blur.

So many memories conjured up by a single Google link. Serendipity indeed.....

The ghosts of Christmases past

My next sister and I belong to the baby boom generation, born in the years immediately after WW2. I say my next sister because I am one of five sisters. My father was a widower with a young daughter, when he met and married my mother in the early years of the war. The year after the war ended I was born, the first of her four children.

The photograph was taken in the kitchen of our terraced house in a cotton town in industrial east Lancashire. It shows my parents and my elder sister, A, with R sitting on her father’s knee and me on my mother’s, with a book on my lap, of course, even at that early age. Looking at us, I think I must have been 3 or 4, which dates the photo to around 1950.

What a different world it was then. Our house was originally a basic two-up and two-down, though by the time my parents moved there it was one of the posher ones in the street by virtue of an extension at the back, which housed a scullery downstairs and that greatest of working-class luxuries, a bathroom, upstairs. The photo shows that the kitchen was still equipped with an old-fashioned range, but in the scullery my mother was also the proud possessor of a gas-stove, alongside the usual wash-copper and mangle.

We left this house to move out into the country before I was seven, so the Christmases I remember celebrating in this house were very early ones. I don’t recall a tree, so perhaps we didn’t have one back then, but I do remember the homemade Christmas decorations, made first by my mother and elder sister and then, under supervision, by R and myself, painstakingly criss-crossing long, narrow strips of different coloured crepe-paper and then carefully unfolding the resulting plaits for my parents to hang around the room.

Both my grandmother, who lived next-door, and my mother were good cooks, so we had our share of Christmas goodies as far as post-war rationing would allow. Turkey was unknown to us and in fact even chicken was a rare treat, enjoyed only at Christmas and Easter. But we had Christmas cake and mince pies and even a few chocolates, so it all seemed very special.

But what I remember above all else about Christmas in this house are the presents R and I received two years running. Because we were so close in age (less than 18 months between us) we were usually treated exactly alike. We would go to bed at the same time on Christmas Eve in the room we always shared, each armed with her Christmas stocking (a laddered old lisle one which had belonged to our mother or grandmother) with its handwritten label so that our presents couldn’t get mixed up.

Oh, the excitement of putting the limp, empty stocking across the foot of the bed on Christmas Eve and then waking early next morning to the weight of the miraculously-filled stocking pressing down on the bedclothes. We never had many presents, but there were always the traditional orange, apple and tangerine in the toe of the stocking, together with the essential net bag of foil-wrapped chocolate coins. There would be small presents from our only set of grandparents and from a couple of elderly great-aunts, but that was all, since by then our parents had no living brothers and sisters.

But, and it is a big but, on the floor at the foot of the bed, would be the present from our parents. Just one present, which of course made it very special. When I was (I think) five and R was four, we were given a walkie-talkie doll each. We have no pictures of them, but I don’t need any. I can still see them both so clearly. R’s had dark hair and brown eyes, whilst mine was a blue-eyed blonde. Wonder of wonders, both would close their eyes when we laid them down.

Our mother, who was a fine dress-maker and made all our clothes, had made clothes for both dolls, a nightie, a day dress and a party dress. After this length of time I can only remember the party dresses and they were wonderful. Each was made of taffeta, with a net overskirt. R’s doll had a yellow dress and mine a blue one, and, as a crowning glory, our mother had painstakingly sewn tiny sequins all over the bodice of each. Even now I wonder at the thought of her, with a house to keep and by then four children to look after, working on these miniature garments in the evenings when we had gone to bed, so that our dolls would be properly dressed.

The following year it was our father’s turn to be the creative one. When R and I woke up on Christmas morning, at the foot of each bed was a dolls-house, made from scratch in the evenings and at weekends. Rather than the front wall coming off to show the rooms within, the long sloping roof lifted up and hinged back to reveal a kitchen and living room, a tiny staircase rising from the ground floor to the first, a little bedroom and a miniscule bathroom.  All the rooms were papered and painted (our father was a painter and decorator by trade) and neatly furnished. The crowning glory this time were the tiny lights in every room, made from torch bulbs powered by a battery, which we could switch on and off at will.

There were carefully chosen presents in subsequent years, and thanks largely to my parents’ example, Christmas has always been a very important time for me. But I don’t think any presents I have received since, however special, will ever replace in my memory and affections my beautifully-dressed and much-loved doll and my perfect little dolls’ house.

The day I fell in love

Until it happened, I didn’t know it was possible. Like most teenagers, by the age of 18 I’d been in love, or thought I had, but that was always with a person, and, sadly for me, he was usually completely ignorant of the fact. I had no idea whatsoever that one could fall in love with a place.

Growing up as I did in industrial east Lancashire, just outside a typical cotton town, I was very used to seeing mills and shops and rows of small terraced houses snaking up the hillside, or the sturdy, grey stone cottages in the scattered moorland village where we lived. What I was not used to was architectural beauty on a grand scale, at least not in a place where it was possible I might actually live.

In my mid-teens I was lucky enough to visit Paris and Arles on a school French trip, and later Hamburg on a German-language exchange, and was bowled over by their beauty and antiquity. But these were holiday destinations, not places where I could imagine myself living.

Everything changed when a couple of my teachers at the local grammar school encouraged me to consider applying for entrance to Oxford University, and believe me, I needed their encouragement.

We were a working-class family, with no experience of higher education, let alone Oxford; indeed my parents hadn’t even had the chance of a secondary education, but had to stay at their elementary schools until they reached school-leaving age at 14. Because of these missed opportunities they believed strongly in education for their daughters and supported me to the hilt when I said that I wanted to try.

As a family we knew no-one who had ever been to Oxford and thus had no idea which of the five women’s colleges I should apply to. In those days the colleges didn’t even produce a prospectus, so I felt completely in the dark as I tried to choose.

The decision was made for me one evening, when my father called me away from my homework to watch University Challenge.  The winning team was from Lady Margaret Hall and I took it as an omen. I sent in my application, in due course sat the entrance exams, and, to my amazement, was called for interview.

It was a cold, grey day in December when I arrived in Oxford by train. The taxi ride from the station to the college passed in a blur of excitement and nerves, and I couldn’t have told you anything about the town through which I’d just been driven. The college was welcoming and the interviews, though nerve-racking, were fair and encouraging, and by the next day I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that I desperately wanted to study there. What had been an abstract ambition had become an urgent desire.

When all the interviews were over, I had a free afternoon before catching my train next morning. So I decided to walk into the city centre and explore a little, before the short winter daylight disappeared. The weather was still cold and grey, indeed it was starting to become foggy. It was the worst possible day for discovering a new place, but it was the only chance I had and I took it. Having bought a town plan, I started to wander. What followed is still as vivid to me now as it was when I tried to describe it to my parents on my return home.  

As I wandered past the ancient college buildings and along the little back streets, walked up the majestic High Street or down Broad Street to Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre and the world-famous Bodleian Library and Radcliffe Camera, I fell hopelessly in love with Oxford.

I loved the extraordinary beauty of its buildings and the profound sense of history which permeated the place, an awareness that for 700 years at least people had been coming here to study and learn and increase the store of human knowledge and understanding.

I knew that it would be the most enormous privilege to be allowed to be part of it all for three years and I still feel this. When I was fortunate enough to be awarded a place, I was aware that life would never be the same again for me and so it proved. For it was in Oxford that I met DH and fell in love for the last time, but that is another story.

Even today, 46 years on from that unforgettable winter's afternoon walk, Oxford is still for me one of my most special places. We all have them, and our lives are the richer for them. I’ve told you one of mine, will you share one of yours?