When they were built in the fifties, not long before my birth, these little houses must have seemed desirable compared to the back-to-back terraces of the inner city, and a hell of a lot better than the tower blocks that would follow in a few years’ time. But now, in the first decade of the new century, the brickwork looked hasty and cheap, the little flower beds were subsiding, and some of the exterior work, like the plaster-covered breeze blocks that lined the driveways, was crumbling. Not much of the street’s original character remained. There were plastic-framed double-glazed windows, rebuilt roofs and chimney stacks, flat-roofed bedrooms built over the garages, even a couple of small conservatories tacked on the front of the houses opposite my father’s, to catch the southern light. After nearly fifty years the houses had mutated, evolved, become divergent.

The people had changed, too. Once this had been a street of young families, with us kids playing elaborate games that paused only when the occasional car came sweeping in off the main road. One car to a household then, Morris Minors, Triumphs, and Zephyrs that fit neatly into the small garages. Now there were cars everywhere, cluttering every drive and double-parked along the pavement. Some of the small gardens had been dug out and paved over, I saw, to make even more room for the cars. There wasn’t a kid to be seen, only cars.

But my home, my old home, was different from the rest.

Our house still had the original wooden concertina-style garage doors, and the small wooden-framed windows, including the bay at the front of the house where I used to sit and read my comics. But I could see how the woodwork was chipped and cracked, perhaps even rotten. There had once been an ivy, an extravagant green scribble over the front of the house. The ivy was long gone, but I could see the scars on the brickwork where it had clung, palely weathered. Just as when my mother had been alive—she’d gone ten years earlier—my father would only do the most basic renovation. He did most of his work for the building trade, and he said he had enough of building and decorating during the week.