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myself back up to bed.
    Such incidents were to recur often throughout my childhood.

3
    MY ENGLISH CHILDHOOD
    P anic attacks aside, I was a carefree, tomboyish sort of girl, always getting ticked off for ripping my dresses and losing countless hair ribbons as I tore around the streets and fields of Barrowford with the other village children. There were hardly any cars in the fifties and our mothers let us roam on our own for hours with the only admonishment being, ‘Make sure you’re back in time for supper, mind.’
    The village of Barrowford was a cluster of streets, mostly rows of terraces, solid and sombre, grey or brown, their facades joined. Some were a tad fancier than others with white paintwork around the windows. Our house was towards the middle of a stretch of these houses fronting the main thoroughfare, Carr Hall Road. Further up the road the posh people lived in imposing homes with titles like Carr Hall House and Green Fields fixed impressively on their front walls or gates. We were fascinated by these well-to-do places and their grounds, and would peer through gaps in the hedges or chinks in the gates, past the sweeping driveways and clipped lawns, at their ivy-clad facades.Some had porticos and bay windows and other such flourishes, their entrances flanked by clipped firs or rose gardens. We would wait and watch, keeping an eye out to make sure there wasn’t anyone around to catch us spying. Who or what we were hoping to see coming out of these houses, I don’t know, but it was intriguing nonetheless. We knew that looking at them was the closest we’d get to living in one. Life was mapped out for us elsewhere, in rows of houses with flattened facades.
    Our own single-fronted terrace was directly across the road from Victoria Park, with its stands of deep green oaks and elms, shady sycamores and ash trees. Pendle Water, a river, ran through it and joined up further along with Colne Water, which flowed down from the moors. We’d play at the water’s edge, squatting down to race leaves that would bob downstream over stones and shingles, or to watch and listen for the plop of fish jumping for flies. The neighbourhood kids collected conkers (horse chestnuts) there in autumn, threading them onto string or a shoelace and using them for conker fights. The aim was to smash your opponent’s conker off its string—there was quite an art to it. Some children, usually boys, cheated by baking their conkers in the oven to make them harder. When we weren’t playing in the park we’d be either running around in the fields close by or playing in the backstreets: narrow areas between the rows of houses, perfect for uninterrupted games of skipping or hopscotch.
    In summer, Mum would sometimes call a halt to the day’s housekeeping and announce, ‘Let’s go on a picnic’. We’d pack a picnic lunch of sandwiches, (always on white bread with potted meat, maybe tomatoes or cucumber); a bottle of pop insarsaparilla or dandelion and burdock flavour; fruit, and if Mum had baked her chocolate cake, a slice each.
    Another of our chief delights was going to the Top Shop. Right at the crest of the next street, the Top Shop was one of two groceries that seemed to sell just about everything. Its front window was crammed with sweets; big glass jars and brown cardboard boxes full of them. We’d spend ages standing at the window deliberating between the “sports mixture” bag (little gummy sweets in the shape of cricket bats, tennis racquets and suchlike) or the bag with the rainbow-coloured kali (sherbet) and a Spanish (licorice stick). The Top Shop owners knew me as “Little Miss Dairy Milk” because each night after Mum went to work at the mill and my sister Jill was in bed, Dad would say, ‘Run up to the Top Shop and buy me a block of Dairy Milk’. I would trot off obediently with sixpence in hand. The shopkeepers would laugh when I came in, and say,