The quiet streets of my childhood

I was born at home, which at that time was a flat at the back of a shop in Haslucks Green Road in Shirley. Shirley is a suburb of Birmingham, now comprising rows of shops and supermarkets stretching for miles along the Stratford Road. Behind the shops are roads of detached and semi-detached houses, which reach further each year over the Warwickshire countryside. I have few memories of my first home, apart from the time that I returned to it one night in a hospital car after a tonsillectomy. At the age of four, we moved to a rented house in Stroud Road, a short distance away. This was a great step up. The house was semi-detached with a front and back garden. At the end of the garden was a sandpit, where my little brother and I would play in summer. A rough access road led along the back gardens, and I spent a lot of time there learning how to ride a bike. Bikes were a safe and common form of transport for children because the roads were almost empty. Children all played in the road, often for many hours of the day. We would move aside when the occasional car appeared. Best of all, empty roads were good for playing on trolleys. My father made a trolley from two planks and four pram wheels. The front axle was on a pivot and could be steered by a rope. I would lie on my trolley and whizz down the hill in Stroud Road.

When I was eleven, my parents managed to buy a house and we left Stroud Road for a larger semi-detached house in Haslucks Croft, also not far away. I do not remember what happened to the trolley. Did my parents dispose of it with the same complex emotions of nostalgia and regret at the passing of childhood that I experience when I now see my own children’s abandoned toys?