Being ten

Sirius and Daughter 2 enjoy a cuddle last weekend.

Fifty years ago (fancy being able to remember that far back!) I was ten, coming up for eleven. We lived at 1 Durham Terrace in the Portobello district of Edinburgh, in a bungalow which had been converted by having two rooms built into the attic. I had the one at the back, overlooking the garden. It was a small house, but it didn't seem so to me because it was the only one I'd ever lived in. My room had wallpaper with little pink roses on it. The carpet was fawn - it wasn't new (I think it had been cut down from the living room carpet or something). My bedcover was green, made from some old curtains as far as I remember. It was the early 60s, still a make-do-and-mend sort of era here.

I loved gardens even then and enjoyed opening the window and gazing out at ours. It was quite a reasonable size, with a lawn near the house, then two long steps which led up through a gap in the hedge to another lawn with apple trees in it. The hedge used to go all the way across, dividing the ornamental garden from the vegetable garden, but my dad opened it up and planted the grass instead of the vegetables. He wasn't really a keen gardener. There were quite a few flower beds also, though, with herbaceous plants which I loved: purple bearded irises, various colours of lupins, geums, a trollius... also a lilac and a pussy willow tree... and we used to plant annuals such as candytuft, Virginian stock and nasturtiums.

I don't suppose I did this often but occasionally I used to go out into the garden very early in the summer holidays, before anyone else was up. I can imagine myself there now: there weren't many cars around in those days and our little street was very quiet anyway. At that hour of the morning the air smelt only of dew-damp earth, there was no sound but the singing of birds and the world seemed new. Our house was at one end of the street with a big brick wall between our garden and the garden of the house in the next street, but between all the gardens in our street there were just low fences, so that I could see all the way up. At that time of the morning, it was my territory.

A couple of years later we moved away, to a much bigger house of which I also have fond memories. But it would be good to be able to slip through time and stand for a few minutes again on that dewy lawn, on a sunny childhood morning, when the world was full of possibilities.