“Can Simon come out to play?”

It was a simple request to the father of a boy along the modest terrace of houses where we lived way back probably 70 years ago. The father, like my own dad, was a young police officer and the police houses belonging to an estate where the big estate house served as a training establishment for the force. My father and this neighbour of ours would both have been instructors at the Police College.

“I’m sorry” came the reply “ he’s busy reading ‘Face to Face with Napoleon‘ so he cannot.

I went home and told my Mum, and she struggled to keep a straight face as she comforted me in my disappointment and suggested a jam sandwich ( my favourite snack ) might ease my pain and muttered “I’m sure he’ll come and play with you after he’s finished with Napoleon”.

A simple “No, sorry he’s busy” would have sufficed, and the response and involving Napoleon was a not so subtle reference to the family’s aspirations for their young son, and perhaps even a dig at their less than cultured neighbours who might lead their literary boy into the wild wilderness of the Beano, or the Dandy, which we had delivered every week, plus the occasional worthy addition of the Eagle comic with its fabulous drawings of spaceships and a chubby spaceman called Digby: Dan Dare’s down to earth partner. Or worse, young Simon might have been tempted to go with us roaming the local fields playing ‘army’ and making damns in a nearby stream out of mud and stones, or even worse, he might have got to know Daphne ‘Pots’ Percival, the slightly older rather forward girl who came out with us and who it is thought became a Blackpool landlady on the Golden Mile. ‘Pots’ was regarded as somewhat advanced in her years for a ten year old, something of an exhibitionist, but slightly terrifying.

What inspired this memory was a recent visit to this group of houses. This is how they looked then. Is that ‘Pots’ in the garden perhaps.When we first moved in she brought my mother a bunch of flowers that she’d nicked from our next door neighbour’s garden. It’s a rare photograph from the 1950s before the invention of pasta, and just after rationing had been abolished. A time when a mars bar was the biggest snack treat and was so thick and sticky it could stick your teeth together. A time when we went out to play all day and only came back for tea, my father or mother shouting out across the fields for us to come in.

Approaching November each year we built a huge bonfire for Guy Fawkes Night, and before the 5th would try out the odd banger or flapjack ( a firework that bounced by your legs crackling as it went in a plume of smoke ) making everyone squeak with apprehension and dance around to avoid sparks or worse coming up our short trousers. Surging through the serge.

I hope that Simon ( if that was his name, it might not have been ) managed to get to the end of his weighty tome. I don’t recall seeing him again, I suspect that aspirational parents had made it clear that he was not to make friends with us from that day forth.

We’d all faced our own Waterloo.