It was Christmas Eve, it was 1953, and I was just four years old.  I was laying between my parents, snug and warm in a double-bed that stretched away into the distance past my restless wiggling feet, as I waited for Father Christmas to visit our little Dover prefab home.

To my right lay my mother large and warm, her nightdress smelling pleasantly of soap, while on my left dad, in his faded blue and white striped pyjamas, snored like a beer barrel sleeping in a brewery.

‘Has he been yet?’ I asked my exasperated mother for the umpteenth time that night. “No, not yet”, she replied with a long drawn out sigh. “Now go to sleep or he won”t come at all’.  I was not quite sure why he “wouldn”t come at all’ if I stayed awake, but I was not going to take any chances.

Closing my eyes again for what to me seemed an eternity, I dared to open them slightly and squinted through my eyelashes expecting to find that Santa had already been.  Out of the corner of my eye I looked at my mother who lay quietly staring at the ceiling; she had obviously given up all hope of ever getting any sleep ages ago. Her breathing was soft and shallow, and had it not been for the gentle rise and fall of her large chest, she could easily have been mistaken for dead. Dad on the other hand was most definitely in the land of the living – his snoring was testimony to that!

I looked around the bedroom as best I could through my half-closed eyes, and without turning my head just in case Father Christmas came into the room at that precise moment and caught me in the act.

The highly-polished dressing table, with the cut-out picture of a pink-breasted chaffinch glued to the mirror, was almost invisible standing against the wall, and the wardrobe in the corner was half hidden in shadow. Along the end wall, half drawn curtains fluttered in the slight evening breeze through the partially opened window, and the dark night sky behind the window pane held a mass of twinkling stars in its grasp.

On mum’s side of the room, part way along the wall, a long floral curtain covered a recess where coats and other things hung on screws in place of hooks, and my old well-worn pushchair stood abandoned and unwanted now that I walked everywhere.