I was stuck in my Nana's house, where I was born. In the front room, transfixed by the pink glass light shade painted with flowers and hanging from the ceiling by three chains.
I've remembered what my fascination with it was now - the dead moths and flies lying in the bottom whose shadows blotted out some of the light.
Every Friday and Saturday night, Teddy boys would fight in the back alley behind my auntie's flat. Broken glass would litter the ground so you didn't go that way til someone swept up, ready for the next bout.
Once there were whispers in the house about a severed finger left wedged in-between the railings outside our school.
Another time my mother told me not to walk near the edge of the pavement lest someone was to grab me and pull me into a car
At home; my Nana's bedroom, small and pretty with its trinkets on the dressing table and a flowered silky counterpane, somewhere I would peep to see if Granny was still dying there. My mum had told me that she had died in my nana's bed, quietly, of stomach cancer. " I'll dance at your wedding Aggie " she would say apparently. My mum loved her granny as I loved my nana and I thought I heard her sometimes, chuckling, sighing, once my fancy saw her shape, small and slender, stirring under the covers against the grey light of a foggy November day, and was not scared, but heard my mother's watch tick tock as it dangled on my wrist and ran to tell her that her granny was alive and the once broken watch had started tick tocking
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