The old clock chimed gently in the corner. The shadows barely moved as the ghostly firelight laughed and danced with glee. The warm curtains shrouded the silver fingers of ice on the window as winter gripped the room.

   Annie moved slightly in her squeaky, warm chair and, glaring at the embers, remembered all the promise of her early life.

   She saw the sixties through the bars of her cot and the gentler bars of a primary school where her first impressions of a world at large were formed. Vague remembrances of decaying plaster, a tottering old teacher and a formative scent of chalk and crayons oozed through her mind.

   Then to higher things: a comprehensive school, mixed thoughts and mixed ability the ethos of the place, the smell of ammonia in the science lab., tearing down corridors full of the screaming energy and insight that she was certainly going to be something in this world….well, almost certainly!

 The leaving day was full of joy and emotion, laughter tore at the roof of the polished hall as hundreds of throbbing teenagers looked through the exits to a new, challenging world outside, a world where anything was hers if she wanted it! And, by Christ, she did! She’d show them all! Cars, a life full of swinging parties, a great job to travel the world, a rich husband at thirty, a rich and full life until death! She’d be a bit of a rebel all her life, you wait and see!

   “Mother can stuff her life…I’ll have mine!”

   Needless to say, out of school, the world outside suddenly grew up. The skies weren’t quite as silver, or the grass as green. The only job she’d been able to find had been at a local cardboard cut out office – strip lighting, striptease books for the blokes, and striped shirts. Vitality sank deep into the pages of her accounts records.

   The endless nights in the shimmering caves of music deep in the heart of a depressed city where no-one could be heard. All sounds were lost there, deep in the silt of a profound ocean of terraced houses where men and women alike literally screamed to get themselves noticed, to break the claustrophobic smell of anonymity which drowned them all.