It was a three-up/two- down semi-detached council house on what was then the northern edge of a Midlands town. At the front was a triangular-shaped lawn with a border, sideways on to the house. Every May, my father bought a vanload of bedding plants, arranged them meticulously in the border, watered, nurtured, and cajoled them until, in July and August he had produced a spectacular, psychedelic display, like a Walt Disney CGI, eliciting gasps of admiration and wonder from passers-by. Sometimes, a small crowd gathered in front of the house, gawping at the garden in amazement. In September, when the plants started to wilt, he pulled them all up and dumped them on the strip of spare land opposite the house, leaving the border bare again until the following May.

The road was quiet, apart from the occasional bus. There was a slight downward slope left to right. When it rained heavily, you could guarantee my mother told anyone who was listening that ‘It was running down our front like a river’. Beyond the strip of spare land, in a dip, was an apologetic little stream. As kids, we sometimes splashed about in it when there was enough water.

Beyond the stream, there were allotments, which eventually were swallowed up by the farmland which lay beyond them. The farm was enormous, and the fields seemed to stretch into the distance for miles. Apparently, the farmer, John Mason, was the national ploughing champion. My father was very proud of our agricultural celebrity neighbour, though I could never quite grasp the significance. There was a line of trees on the horizon, and beyond that was the countryside, with the country lanes beloved by my father. After retirement, he spent entire days roaming round them, always alone. I imagined him stopping occasionally to light his pipe, take in his surroundings, and listen to the birds.

The blot on the landscape was a vast engineering plant, about half a mile away on the right looking out of the front window. I never knew what they did there, but it must have been dangerous because sometime in the 1950s, in the middle of the night, part of it blew up with a very loud bang, causing panic among the neighbours who, with memories of the war still fresh, thought a bomb had gone off. Miraculously, there were no fatalities.

At the back of the house there was a lawn on the left, a concrete path down the middle, and a garden on the right, this one planted with rose bushes and sensible perennials. My job was to mow the lawn with an old push-and-pull Qualcast lawnmower. The garden was the length of a cricket pitch, with a privet hedge down each side. At the far end was an Anderson shelter, a relic from the war. The gang used it for meetings and to shelter when it rained. Across the bottom of the garden was a wooden fence. It should really have had a gate it in because the gang climbed over it to gain access to the school playing field on the other side. Most of our leisure time must have been spent on that field, playing cricket in summer and football in winter. It was private land, but for years no-one bothered us, nobody seemed to mind.

Then – we must have been about fourteen – signs went up. ‘Private property. Trespassers will be prosecuted.’ After some discussion the gang decided to ignore them. By now, with homework to do in the evenings, we were only playing at weekends and during school holidays, so we thought we might get away with it. We didn’t. One day a big policeman strode across the outfield, interrupting an England Test Match. He said that if he found us there again, we would all go to prison. It so happened that there was a proper sports ground about fifteen minutes’ walk from my house. The gang agreed that, grossly inconvenient though it might be, humping our kit to the sports ground was, all things considered, a better option than going to prison. Mick suggested there wouldn’t be enough to eat in prison, and Robert informed us – without quoting his exact words – that we would have to go to the toilet in a bucket. We must have been a squeamish bunch because nobody fancied that. So, we packed our gear and set off for the sports ground.

The house was always immaculate. My mother was housekeeper, and she ensured the house was always clean and nicely decorated. There was no central heating in those days. In summer it didn’t matter, but in winter the only source of heat was the coal fire in the living room. The gas fires in the bedrooms expelled plenty of toxic fumes but no warmth. So, my mother’s first job of the day was to rake out the ashes from the fireplace and build a fire. By tea-time the living-room could become pleasantly warm. In the evenings, my father, if he was there, liked to add a piece of coal occasionally to create a roaring inferno. The fire guard wasn’t used when we were in the house, so sometimes a burning coal would roll out of the fire onto the rug in front of it. My mother would pick it up with the fire tongs, but my father would retrieve it with bare hands and having returned the coal to the fire, would dance around the room making strange sounds. Visitors would sometimes comment on the holes in the rug, or my father’s burnt fingers.

My father was a creature of habit. After his infrequent baths, he would stand in front of the mirror over the fireplace and rub hair-cream into hair which had long since vanished. It was what he had always done. With his job as a busy office manager, I don’t know how he found the time to come home every day for lunch, but he did. So, the meal was on the table at 1pm precisely as my father walked through the door. Tea was a bit more flexible and might be five minutes before or after 6pm. By bedtime I was usually starving and filled up on cake of which there was always plenty, my mother being an enthusiastic baker. This left me with an unhealthy sweet tooth which I eventually had to overcome in later life.

While everyone else was installing a tv in their home in the 1950s, my father resisted for years, because it wasn’t what he was used to. So, entertainment at home was the radio – wireless in those days – and in our house always tuned to what used to be the Light Programme, later rebranded as BBC Radio 2. I recall ‘Housewives’ Choice’, ‘Music While you Work’, ‘Two-Way Family Favourites’, ‘Workers’ Playtime’, comedy shows and a stream of banal post-war dance music. I blame the Light Programme for my stunted intellectual development. Then, around 1960, our rented tv arrived. I suspect that someone at work must have told my father about watching the horse-racing on Saturday afternoons.

The best day of the year was undoubtedly Christmas. My mother’s six siblings, their partners and assorted offspring somehow squeezed into the house and found somewhere to sit. Fortunately, we had little contact with my father’s multitudinous relations; I have no idea what we would have done with them. Somehow, my mother provided enough Christmas dinner to keep everybody happy.

In the afternoon the men sat round the table and played cards, and the room filled up with tobacco smoke. The kids played with their presents and squabbled quietly. The women were in the kitchen, gossiping, washing up and preparing an enormous tea: salad, sausage rolls, slices of ham and tongue, bowls of sweet sloppy trifle, and of course a cornucopia of cake, mince pies and lemon tarts. And gallons of tea. Sheer bliss. The visitors sat around and chatted till 7pm, and then people began to go home, with hugs and ‘thank you for a lovely day, Nellie’ and ‘goodbye Harry. Look after yourself’.

Soon they were all gone, and the house was quiet again. I was sorry, even sad. I enjoyed the company, the friendly banter, and the bustle. My mother probably sighed with relief.

School is another story; suffice it to say that I was bored, baffled, or terrified, sometimes all at once. I preferred to be at home. It was comfortable, and I felt safe and secure; with a bit of luck, it might even be warm, and I was happy there. But the idyll was not to last. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I discovered that war had broken out between my menopausal mother and ageing father. Maybe eleven or twelve. I was having breakfast one Saturday morning when I heard angry raised voices in the kitchen. It was totally unexpected, and I was absolutely devastated. I think my childhood probably ended that day. The happiness and security were replaced with worry and uncertainty. My world was turned upside-down. My father was now usually absent, preferring to remain in the office for hours after everyone else had left, then walking round the pitch-black country lanes, rather than come home to my mother. I too found my mother’s sulky presence oppressive and spent most of the time in my chilly bedroom. I was at grammar school by now and made the excuse that I needed to be alone to study. In fact, I was either daydreaming about a girl in my class called Pauline, who had a blond pony-tail and sky-blue eyes, or listening to the pop records I bought with my pocket money.

I could understand my mother’s bitterness. My father had treated her as the housekeeper and took her for granted – as I did, following my father’s example. He neglected his appearance. He was always clean-shaven for work, but he was toothless and wore old, shabby clothes. Nevertheless, he was the breadwinner, and we were totally dependent on him. I sometimes imagined life without him, living with my mother under a tree on John Mason’s farm. They stayed together because in those days that’s what people did.

Eventually, the dust settled, and they learned to live peaceably under the same roof again. My father smartened up, acquiring some new clothes and a set of false teeth. After he retired, I even detected small signs of mutual affection. In my father’s final days, when his health had failed and every memory had deserted him, my mother looked after him with forbearance and compassion.

By now, I was living in another part of the country. On my occasional visits home, the house was no longer the warm comfort zone it had once been. It felt cold and bleak without my father’s presence. My mother appeared to be perfectly contented, but after a few years she could no longer climb the stairs, and reluctantly agreed to a transfer to a ground-floor council flat near her sister.

The day my mother left the house in 1982 was the last time I saw it. The area had already undergone drastic changes, with entire streets demolished to make way for a by-pass. A road had cut through John Mason’s fields, like a long wound.

A few years ago, I met up with Robert who was in the city on business. He told me the area was unrecognisable. The farm had gone, replaced by a gigantic retail park and a huge housing estate. He offered to take me to see it. But I preferred to remember the place as it was when it was home, with the rain running down our front like a river, the farmland stretching into the distance for miles, the line of trees on the horizon with the country lanes beyond, and somewhere among them, my father, stopping to light his pipe and listen to the birds.