It marked the end of a parade of shops and was very friendly. Moss Way Library was a few yards from my new school, and it wasn’t quite as austere as Norris Green. Not too far but we had to leave our schools and friends. In late 1977 we moved from Norris Green to Croxteth about a mile and a half away. There was a children’s section and I could have a Junior Library Card which gave me two tickets for 28 days. There were books in glass cases and huge encyclopaedias which clearly hadn’t been moved in years. If it was old and ordered, I was into it. Obviously, the silence was the first thing I noticed but rather than being chastened by it I quite liked it. Norris Green Library was an imposing place. Our parents couldn’t really splash out on gifts for us and days out were rarer still. I knew this was a significant episode, so I made a note to remember the date. One night I was struggling to fall asleep when the blanket moved up my body. We knew already that there was a presence.

At the top of the landing she saw the torso of a woman walk across. One day she opened the front door and looked up the stairs which ended a yard or so at her feet.

My mum could set jellies in there in the height of summer. Oh, and there was one small bedroom which was always cold. Every now and then the taps in the kitchen would turn themselves on and off. She didn’t just have us to deal with either. Karen and I weren’t especially mischievous, but like any children we could be a handful so it couldn’t have been easy for my mum to deal with us on her own when my dad was at work. There was a garden and a large tree at the end which I climbed daily much to her consternation as I wasn’t too concerned about my safety.

Our house was a semi-detached built at an angle to face a junction. My mum worked too but she was home often as not, looking after my sister and I. He may have had a stare that could open an oyster at sixty paces (as Bertie Wooster says of his Aunt Dahlia) but he loved a laugh and we had the sort of relationship where we had secret ‘in’ jokes from my early years onwards. He worked a lot of strange shift hours, so he was only a constant in my life in the hours of darkness. My dad had a job at the docks though he lost it to redundancy in the final month of the decade. Growing up in Norris Green, Liverpool in the 1970s wasn’t easy. So far in this occasional series I’ve talked about how George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four woke something in me at the precisely the time it was supposed to and how Richard Bachman/Stephen King’s Rage made me want to write.

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