For me the afternoon stretched into endless adventure, but for my mother and grandmother there was still work to do. We often had a cooked Sunday lunch, perhaps we had cold meat, I don’t recall, but the smell of minted new potatoes still conjures up memories of summer Sundays at the cottage. We always had a glass of pop with lunch, Tizer or my favourite Cherryade, on other days we drank water with meals. Tea was usually a salad with tinned salmon, pork pie or cold meat and piles of bread and butter. Grandma always peeled the cucumber, sliced it thinly and served it in vinegar; I could eat it in those days but I decided long ago that life was too short to wrestle with the evils of cucumber or Brussels sprouts. Throughout my childhood tea was taken in cups with saucers, the mention of a mug would send Grandma into a decline and drinking out of such a thing was, like walking outside the house in your slippers, evidence of being ‘common’ and not properly brought up. Tea was made with loose tea in a teapot, the little spoon inside the tea caddy measured out just the right amount of tea, one spoon for each person and one for the pot. Even on a warm summer Sunday the teapot was adorned with a thick tea cosy to preserve the temperature while the tea brewed. There was always a home made cake for Sunday tea time, Madeira perhaps or a fruit cake with almonds on the top or my absolute favourite, cherry cake. Often there would be jelly, tinned fruit and cream as well. Tinned mandarin oranges were a special favourite of mine, but I liked them just as they were, not with cream, ice cream or anything else. My other grandmother, known to her grandchildren as Nanny used to get the tinned oranges especially for me, but she always put Ideal milk on them, apparently my older cousin Calvin loved it, but I wished that she would keep it for him because it spoiled my oranges.

I had a sandpit at the cottage and a beautiful swing, sometimes we took my paddling pool, my dolls pram or my little bicycle, but I was happy to play on my own wandering in the lane looking for wild rabbits or birds nests. Often there were cattle in the field at the back of the cottage and I would spend hours leaning over the fence feeding them handfuls of long grass and letting them lick my fingers. I wasn’t afraid and even as a very tiny child I loved the cattle. There was ample evidence of the presence of moles and it was my job to jump on the molehills and flatten the soil. I only saw a live mole once; it had fallen into the pit of the cattle grid and become trapped. I wanted to stroke it until the farmer known to me as Uncle Joe said that it would bite me, but as an act of kindness to me he rescued the mole and set it free. That is one of the few occasions that I recall him making a concession to sentiment.

Rhubarb grew in the cottage garden, sometimes my mum would cut a nice stick of rhubarb for me, and when it was washed and cleaned she would give me a saucer with a little bit of Sugar on it to dip my stick of rhubarb and eat it raw. We picked gooseberries from the bush in the garden, I wasn’t quite as keen on eating those raw, I wasn’t over fond of them cooked either! Plums from the tree in the farmhouse orchard were much more to my taste as were the blackberries that grew in the hedgerows as summer turned towards autumn. Uncle grew peas, potatoes, runner beans and all sorts of salad crops in the cottage garden and we often went home laden with produce. I liked to pop the pea pods and scrape the peas in to a colander, but it was a pleasure tinged with fear as occasionally the pod would contain a wriggly maggot and I dreaded accidentally touching a maggot.

I recall little about the homeward journey, I always looked out for the Teddy Boys in their bright suits with drainpipe trousers as we drove through Kettering, but the movement of the car soothed me to sleep long before we got home.