ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Peter's childhood home in particular, the wastelands and gardens of Ivy Cottage in relation to, not only the cultural texts of the time, the 1970s, but both adult and childhood texts predating Peter's mid-1960s birth. This will not only demonstrate both the longevity of such texts, but stress that childhood of a particular decade does not exist in its own cultural bubble: for every decade of childhood is a cumulative reinterpretation of what it is to be a child. The chapter appreciates that Peter's childhood of this era, the 1970s, took place in a family home within which there were constant reminders of the age of the house. Ruth M. Arthur's novel On the Wasteland, citing the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, defines wasteland' as Land in its natural uncultivated state'. The garden at Ivy Cottage was, of course, not just a masculine defensible space. As, in many respects, it was a feminine space of insecurity and uncertainty.
