Okay, this should have gone up two weeks ago...

The street where I grew up...no-one had a car then.

I have just come back from a rather lovely holiday in a cottage in Wales. No ordinary cottage being a fan of The Landmark Trust - this one had an enormous fowl house attached to it - bigger than the cottage; the result of the vision of a Victorian Industrialist! That's the Victorians for you - doing it properly. Okay, so class was absolutely clear then but the cottage we stayed in was where the poultry keeper lived, and I could have lived with that, I think. Although it would of course, being work for a man. Still, a girl can dream.

The fowl house at Poultry Cottage, Welshpool

It was bitterly cold there though. The Landmark Trust develop abandoned historical properties of interest, and they do it sympathetically. No central heating, and no double glazing. One of the things that was really noticeable with this was that the bathroom was absolutely freezing. No hanging around in there when it's minus 12 outside!

The bathroom and bathroom activities at Poultry cottage were very reminiscent of baths as a child. In and out in three seconds flat and then throwing on every single piece of clothing you can find in under a minute, as if a time penalty kicked in if you failed. I remember my older brother (the wag) saying in response to my, "Oi - it's chilly in here" when he opened the door, "Very strange, it's England our here!" I feel duty bound to report that he is a comedian now.

The other thing that poultry cottage had in common with the house I grew up in as a child was that the toilet was approximately 4 days away from the bedroom. My sister, Kim (aka the long-suffering one) was woken up to accompany me on the long journey when I wanted to go. I was literally afraid of my own reflection when the kitchen light was switched on - always surprised even though I knew it was coming, to see myself looking back, slightly disheveled and a little skeletal. Our toilet was in the furthest reaches of the house - down a landing, down two stairs, across a short landing to the main stairs, down a hallway and across the aforementioned kitchen. It was, in other words, practically outside (where it had been originally) and it was regularly beyond perishing cold. It was equivalent to entering the Arctic Time Zone. Next door to the toilet, my dad used the original scullery as a shed - an indoor shed, a place he stored things of purpose. There was something about the grime and the blackness of that room with its shadowy tools (and once a couple of dead rabbits that uncle Keith had brought) that scared me too. It was a male, unfinished sort of place, cold and unforgiving. There was a mirror behind the toilet door but it was possible with skill and careful thought to manoeuvre yourself out of it without catching a glimpse of your own ghostly presence.

The house I grew up in...

A story springs to mind. My grandfather Jarvis, (my mother's father) arrived once to look after us when my mum was doing a shift at Smith and Nephews. He walked towards the house with his trilby cocked at a rakish angle, with a practiced nonchalance in his stride. BUT children had changed since his own had grown up, and he had not reckoned with our wind-up record player or the half a dozen orange vinyl classics we possessed: 'Skip to my Lou' being the one I remember most vividly. We played it incessantly throughout the evening and did precisely as we assumed it asked - 'skipped to the loo' - which we clearly thought hilarious. On and on we skipped in spite of Granddad's protestations (as an aside I was probably 20 before I realised that the first line: 'shoo fly don't bother me' didn't relate to a fly that liked your laces. I had similar problems with 'this cross eyed bear' in the song at church.) Anyway, the upshot of all the skipping and the repeated Arctic blasts as the door opened and then banged shut, was that Grandma Jarvis looked after us after that and she taught us how to knit; the kind of thing girls are supposed to know.