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the best of times. In Kath’s case, a concrete orange disc ideal for use as a paperweight or doorstop.
    2 Torchy lived on another planet with a poodle and a talking letterbox for companions. He was incredibly gay.
    3 One of a range of eerie Victorian illnesses like whooping cough and the dropsy, eradicated by inoculation.
    4 Traditionally poor area of South London docks, now renovated for corporate singles.

5

    Free Time
    CHILDHOOD WAS FILLED with agonizing afternoons spent waiting beyond the whispers, or attending bizarre rituals for the sake of my parents. The least pleasurable of these was the Cubs, 1 presided over by a man who looked like Central Casting’s idea of a paedophile. His pressed fawn shorts were so wide at the hem and his thighs so thin that we all had to look away when he crouched down in front of us for fear of witnessing a testicular protrusion. There was a particularly trying bout of suppressed laughter in the troop after he asked whether anyone had seen his conkers during a park ramble.
    Having failed to impress in Ropecraft, Woodsmanship (acts of arson involving the rubbing of sticks), Folk Dancing, Tracking or Being a Friend to Animals (due to an earlier incident involving a tethered stag beetle and a magnifying glass), I was luckily hit in the eye with a cricket ball and excused meetings long enough for the Cubmaster to wearily assume that I was unlikely to return.
    With the woggle safely discarded, the other blot on my free time was Sunday School, which involved lolling around on hard wooden benches while Miss Parker, a dumpy, well-meaning woman whose bulky undergarments showed through her cardigan like riot-gear, bowdlerized the Bible’s more lurid tales into fables suitable for tiny tots. To do this she used an easel and a set of pastel-coloured Fuzzy Felt action figures. The set included stick-on halos, Jacob’s ladder (like a regular painter’s ladder but golden) and a boulder for removing from Jesus’s tomb in order to facilitate resurrection.
    Miss Parker had the kind of mind that automatically went blank whenever it was confronted with images of fornication or retribution. Consequently, her biblical world consisted solely of kind acts, good Samaritans, loving thoughts and turned cheeks. She said that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s ladyfriend and called the disciples his ‘best chums’. Everyone hated her except a pigtailed girl in the front row who got to put away the Fuzzy Felt figures as a reward for perfect attendance. She died of diphtheria in her second year, and nobody wanted her seat in case it was infected.
    As a child of the fifties and sixties, I had several other claims on my precious free time:
    Moorfields Eye Hospital (for eye-strengthening exercises that involved overlapping chipped Victorian slides of tigers and songbirds in cages, and flesh-coloured NHS specs held together in the centre with Elastoplast).
    Inoculation queues (for Diphtheria, Tuberculosis and a variety of poxes left over from an earlier century, possibly the seventeenth). Weeks passed in a dark room with whooping cough, chicken pox and measles, when you weren’t allowed to open the curtains in case you suddenly went blind, and some kind of respiratory illness which required you to spend evenings with your face suspended above a steaming enamel bowl with a tea towel draped over your head.
    Visits to bombsites, the source of all major childhood injuries due to the fact that they regularly required scaling up and sliding down. (‘He fell twenty feet into a pitch-black crater and nobody heard his desperate cries for help,’ ran one of Kath’s awful warnings. ‘His voice grew fainter and fainter until it finally ceased altogether. They didn’t find him until after Lent.’)
    The fifties was also populated with the kind of characters who turned up in Ealing comedies, and some who didn’t, including:
    Men in mackintoshes, who went funny during the War and were now likely to interfere with you if you were