I have written before about how the coots in the east basin of St Katharine Docks have discovered that the rudder of the boat in the photo below makes a convenient perch for grooming and that I am used to seeing them there. Today, though I was given a surprise.

Occupying the perch today was not a coot but a female Mallard duck. While I was watching her, I had another surprise.

She hopped off the rudder and started swimming away and as she did so, three ducklings popped out from the shadow of the pontoon and took after her!

The coloured speckles are light reflected off the ripples caused by the movement of the ducks and the camera has not managed to deal with them very well.

After moving a short distance, the group stopped swimming and remained floating quietly in the sunshine.

Mallards don’t seem to frequent this basin so it will be interesting to see whether they stay or whether this was just a visit.

Until my nineteenth year, I lived in the seaside town (now city) of Brighton. My mother was a widow living on sparse means, my father having died when I was 18 months old. We lived in a quiet but pleasant street, occupying a terrace house which my mother rented. I do not know when that street of houses was built but would guess that they were late Victorian or early Edwardian. The houses had been built without a bathroom and with an outside toilet. In our house, as in many others in the neighbourhood, a bathroom and indoor toilet had been created by partitioning off parts of rooms on the upper storey. Needless to say, there was no hot running water. An ancient gas “geyser” provided hot water for the bath until it finally gave up the ghost and was replaced by a water tank with a tap, heated by means of a gas ring beneath it. Hot water for all other purposes was obtained by boiling a kettle.

We spent most of our time in the room we called “the kitchen” even though it wasn’t a kitchen. It adjoined what my mother called “the scullery” and which anybody else would have called “the kitchen” because it was in that space that the sink, the gas cooker and a built-in cupboard we called “the larder” were installed.

At the front of the house was a room that we called, appropriately enough, “the front room”. We used this only for special occasions, such as when entertaining guests or when my sister and her husband came to spend Christmas with us. Room heating was by means of a fireplace in each room and by a portable paraffin heater. For economy, we usually lit only one fire during the winter, that in “the kitchen”.

On the upper floor, as well as the bathroom and toilet (which we called “the lavatory”, as was usual in those days), were three bedrooms. My mother occupied the best, front bedroom and I had a room at the back, overlooking the garden. The third bedroom was often occupied by a paying guest until my teen years when my mother turned it over to me as a “playroom”. This floor was accessed from the lower by a staircase on whose 16 steps I first learnt to count. Even now, when I go up or down a staircase, I tend to count the steps and if they number exactly 16 this gives me a thrill of recognition.

My mother kept up the back garden as best she could. On three sides it was limited by a brick wall about four feet high separating it from the properties on either side and opposite. In the centre was a rectangle of rough grass on which we could sit in deckchairs in summer and on which I sometimes pitched my small tent, bought for me as a present for “passing” the 11-plus exam. (Theoretically, you did not “pass” or “fail” this landmark exam; your result determined which kind of secondary school you were assigned to. Naturally enough, parents tended to consider that being selected for the grammar school, as I was lucky to be, was equivalent to “passing”.)

I loved that house and, many decades and many dwelling later, still retain fond memories of it. I visited it twice in latter years, once, when all I could do was to look at it from outside, and a second time, when with Tigger I went there and the workmen who were converting it into two flats allowed me to go inside briefly. It is no doubt purely in my imagination that on both occasions I felt that the house recognized and remembered me.

When I was nineteen, my mother having inherited a sum of money, we moved to the then village of Bishops Cleeve, near Cheltenham, and took up residence in a newly built bunglow, my sister and her husband occupying the bungalow next door.

Curiously, despite loving the old house in Brighton, I left it without a qualm. I now put this down partly to the excitement of moving permanently to a place where we had previously spent our holidays and partly to the dreadful insouciance of youth. Many times in later years I have thought of that terrace house in Brighton and imagined returning there to find it awaiting me exactly as it was when it was my home.