Just one warning - if you're looking for something happy, then don't read this. This is not Fiction.
When I was little, we lived in a cottage surrounded by cooking apple trees. We had a huge garden and a swing. I had a next door neighbour and my sister to play with. The fact that it was on an American airbase didn't encroach at all.
We'd go on outings to see Mum's family in Aldeburgh and I would have ice cream and fish and chips with my Nanny. I would play with my friends there and go to the beach, paddle in the cold north sea and make stone castles (the beach at Aldeburgh is shingle) with seaweed banners.
Sweets were fun - I could have a bag full of bananas, shrimps, flying saucers, cola bottles and jelly beans for 10p that would last me all day. The comics were simple. Dennis the Menace and the Bash St Kids in the Beano and Dangerous Dan with his cow pies in the Dandy.
That all changed when I was eight.
