The narrow path running parallel with the wall leads from the enormous kitchen at the rear of the house, which served as our living room. My mother would lead us small children up to the low wall bordering this path where we would all sit together on balmy summer afternoons. Hot out-of-doors tea and freshly made currant loaf melting with butter made our picnic treat. My father, hot and dirty from digging, smiled with achievement. My mother fulfilled as wife and mother smiled too. It was a happy time.

That run of apple trees on the eastern border proved less euphoric for the boy caught stealing their fruit. One of the gang who had taken to raiding the garden, my father imprisoned him for an afternoon in the underground boiler room that heated the greenhouse. My mother was aghast at such cruelty, my father phlegmatic. He had no further trouble from local lads.

As we retrace our steps to the gate, I'll tell you of another time that boiler house caused great excitement. My father had to spend a Sunday afternoon digging out the flues. He stimulated my brother and myself to help him for hours that wintry day by telling us there was a secret underground tunnel linking Sheffield Castle, to the West, with Wincobank Hill to the East, along which the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots had tried to escape. Never has the uncovering of flues been regarded with such exhilaration. My mother called such deception, shameful. I disagree. To stir imagination in this way is an art and I am eternally grateful, not only for the host of memories my father planted but also for the imagination he nurtured that I might stroll at will within my garden long after the original has ceased to be.