I shall endeavour to continue at the same cliff-hanging spot which I had reached, when I was yesterday so rudely interrupted.
I believe I was pondering on the delights of having carpet on the stairs on the way to opening the door for the doctor. Doctors always wore dark suits and ties on home visits in those days, and really did carry large black leather bags. I watched the elderly doctor as he opened his bag, revealing all manner of shiny instruments and a rubber snake-like thing. I didn't get to see much more, as everybody seemed to remember at once that I should have been at school, so I was duly sent on my way.
My grandmother had had a heart attack and was to spend the next three weeks in St Pancras Hospital. She was already gone, by the time I got back from school that afternoon. I evidently had not thought to tell anyone in authority at about what had happened, so I just walked home with my friends as usual.
The nice lady upstairs with the baby opened the door to me and explained that I was to stay with her until my mother got home. It was quite a novelty look out of the windows and see the street below even further away than it was from our windows, the floor below. It was also a novelty that they had a television. I remember there was a very interesting programme about the sun on children's television, but the baby kept on crying and I couldn't hear it properly.
I knew all about televisions of course. My aunt who lived in a nice house in Hatch End had one, as well as carpet on the stairs, and the three of us had gone there to watch the Queen's coronation, the previous summer. A few years later, we were to inherit that particular television set, that unfortunately could only receive BBC, and not ITV, which rendered it redundant at Hatch End.
When it arrived in our narrow kitchen, it looked even more enormous than how I had remembered it. It was a huge, solid, wooden cube-like structure, with the end of the cathode-ray tube protruding another six inches or so from the back. In the front, was a (by today's standards) a tiny twelve-inch screen with a couple of bakerlite control knobs
underneath. New, this contraption cost £64 which would have represented more than two months' salary for my mother. But, of course, we didn't pay anything like that amount.

How did I get on to televisions, when I was meant to be talking about heart attacks? My grandmother had indeed had a heart-attack that morning, and she was lucky to have survived it,she was told afterwards.
It was a long walk to St Pancras Hospital, even further than to the library, which was also a long way away and in more or less the same direction. My mother and I used to go to the hospital every evening, and I got to know it quite well. Visiting times were very strict though, and at the end of the allotted hour, a bell or a buzzer would sound, at which all the visitors would obediently troop out. The ward where my grandmother lay, like all the others in those days, was one long room, with big windows down one side and the nurses' desk in the middle, where all the patients could see them and feel reassured, unless of course, the floral curtains round the bed were pulled.
Some people used to stay in hospital for an awfully long time back then. In the bed next to my grandmother was an elderly lady who had been in that ward for over five years, and the woman in the bed in the corner had been there so long that no-one could quite remember any more, when she had arrived.
During my childhood, the nurses wore smart, white and blue striped dresses with rolled-up sleeves hidden under lacy arm-bands and lacy hats to match. Their aprons looked so white and stiff that they could have been made out of best quality shiny paper, and they always wore black stockings and flat, black, shiny shoes. The wards were kept spotless and smelt of a mixture of disinfectant and soap. They smelt clean. You felt that it was safe to be as ill as you liked in such places. The sister in charge wore a darker, plain blue dress, and although she always seemed to be rushing about, she was always very nice to me.
After a couple of weeks of trying to fulfil three functions at once, being a dutiful daughter and a regular hospital visitor, being a full-time employee and trying to look after me at the same time, my frazzled mother packed me off to Tangmere, where my uncle lived in the airmen's married quarters.
It was fun playing with the other kids in the underground air-raid shelters. We found a sack of carrots in one once. It was at Tangmere that I learned to find the Plough in the unpolluted night sky, and it was there that I went to a tiny village school with only two classes, and all taught in the same room. It was also there that I came to the conclusion that I was not on the same wave-length as my aunt, and my uncle seemed frighteningly strict. With the insight of adulthood, I would realise what great people they were, and they truly tried to do their best for me. But back then, I felt like an evacuee, and I all I wanted to get back to London.
A few weeks later I did just that. It was lovely to be home again. My grandmother was still recuperating, but her personality had returned to normal so I felt reassured and safe once more.
For the first time I was given my own front door key, which meant that my grandmother would not have to come traipsing downstairs to open the door for me several times a day, and I could let myself in.
I was also sent out more frequently to the Brecknock to do bits of shopping, and it was my job to keep the coal bucket filled up. In the course of this last job, I made a new friend. He was a little brown and white mouse who used to do back somersaults out of the coal bucket. I began leaving him crumbs and to regard him as my secret pet. I have forgotten what happened to him. He probably ended up in the mouse trap which my mother regularly put out , and she didn't have the heart to show me his mangled remains.