ABSTRACT
At the top of our very long, narrow and steep driveway, a nightmare in backing your car down to the road, as attested by the deep gouges ground out of the side of our ancient sandstone house during Mother’s many somewhat unsuccessful attempts at reversing, there stood father’s old blue shed. Like a relic of America’s prairie disasters in the 1930s, it tilted and sagged, bearing evidence of numerous attempts at propping, patching and fixing. In it, apart from an old pre-war sports car up on bricks, ‘waiting until I can get round to fixing it’, was an antique treadle-operated lathe, with cracked leather drive belts, and an even older seaman’s chest. It contained a jumble of rusty, dusty tools, which marked your hands red, and emitted a faintly metallic odour. These had been handed down in the Bradshaw family for generations; indeed, we had a line of ancestors all born, probably, as I was, on the kitchen table, in Number 12, Village Road, Higher Bebington, for many generations, maybe dating back to the days of King Charles I. It was a John Bradshaw, after all, who signed the latter’s death warrant.
