*The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

I remember the morning well. At about a quarter to eight I’d nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut the kids out. It was a beastly January morning, with a dirty yellowish-grey sky. Down below, out of the little square of bathroom window, I could see the ten yards by five of grass, with a privet hedge round it and a bare patch in the middle, that we

call the back garden. There’s the same back garden, some privets, and same grass, behind every house in Ellesmere Road. Only difference—where there are no kids there’s no bare patch in the middle.*