Skater Girl

Outside our house is a skip the size of Denmark.

So I've been finding lots of stuff to put in it. And I found these.

My old roller skates. No, I didn't have one foot bigger than the other - it was that these were some state-of-the art mid-Sixties design where they fitted on to your ordinary shoes, with a slider in the middle to make them bigger or smaller.

My shoes were generally sandals of the Clarks Sensible kind, and these fitted them well.

The skates were a birthday or Christmas present - I forget which - and I loved them, and spent hours and hours skating around the neighbourhood in them. One time I hit a little stone, tripped, ended up kneeling down - - and knelt on a wasp, which of course stung me. It hurt like hell, I remember!

But I think that was the only accident I ever had on them. I was never really any good at going backwards, but forwards was fine, always leaning slightly forward to prevent my legs shooting out in front of me.

I know that, if you gave me some roller skates to wear now, I could still roller skate. The Communist made me some solid wooden stilts as well (let's face it, everything he made was either solid, or wooden, or usually both) and I know that I can still walk on stilts too, though there hasn't been much call for me to do either of these things recently.

In those days we seemed to have lots of sunny summer afternoons. Perhaps we used them all up and that's why there aren't so many now. Anyway, those are what I remember - skating round the streets in the sunshine, going nowhere in particular and having a lot of fun, either by myself or with Gillian from across the road, and then going in for tea when it was beginning to be dusk.

My skates are old, they're broken, and I should throw them in the skip. But I don't want to. That's the kind of thing that happens when you live in a house that you moved in to when you were three.