ABSTRACT
‘From the window of my room in the University I used to be able to see beyond the high back-garden wall a typical small builder’s yard. It was stacked with ladders of all lengths, planks, barrels, packing cases, house bricks, sacks of cement and plaster, wheelbarrows, buckets, spades, saws, tools of many fascinating shapes and varieties… The whole place, were it not for the high protecting wall and the double-barred gate, was a children’s dream of heaven! There were hundreds of dark and dusty places to explore; there were innumerable possibilities in the way of quickly erected hidey-holes; those pieces of timber would make a stockade for Long John Silver; that little platform was simply crying out for a Superman take-off. Any child with any imagination and any fund of “comic” lore in his memory could improvise endless happy hours in such a place.’
