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The Filling-station
When I was four months old, my mother died suddenly and my father was left to look after me all by himself This is how I looked at the time
I had no brothers or sisters
So all through e of four months onward, there were just the two of us, my father and me
We lived in an old gipsy caravan behind a filling-station My father owned the filling-station and the caravan and a small field behind, but that was about all he owned in the world It was a very s-station on a small country road surrounded by fields and woody hills
While I was still a baby, ed s a mother normally does for her child That is not an easy task for aat the sa customers with petrol
But my father didn't seem to mind I think that all the love he had felt formy early years, I never had a moment's unhappiness or illness and here I am on my fifth birthday
I was now a scruffy little boy as you can see, with grease and oil all over me, but that was because I spent all day in the workshop helping my father with the cars
The filling-station itself had only two pumps There was a wooden shed behind the pu in the office except an old table and a cash register to put the money into It was one of those where you pressed a button and a bell rang and the drawer shot out with a terrific bang I used to love that
The square brick building to the right of the office was the workshop My father built that hi in the place 'We are engineers, you and I,' he used to say to ood work in a rotten workshop' It was a fine workshop, big enough to take one car co It had a telephone so that custo their cars in for repair
The caravan was our house and our ho wheels and fine patterns painted all over it in yellow and red and blue My father said it was at least a hundred and fifty years old Many gipsy children, he said, had been born in it and had grown up within its wooden walls With a horse to pull it, the old caravanthe roads and lanes of England But now its wanderings were over, and because the wooden spokes in the wheels were beginning to rot, my father had propped it up underneath with bricks
There was only one rooer than a fair-sized modern bathroom It was a narrow rooainst the back ere two bunk beds, one above the other The top one was my father's, the bottom one mine
Although we had electric lights in the workshop, ere not allowed to have them in the caravan The electricity people said it was unsafe to put wires into soht in ipsies had
done years ago There was a wood-burning stove with a chih the roof, and this kept us warm in winter There was a paraffin burner on which to boil a kettle or cook a stew, and there was a paraffin la
When I needed a bath, my father would heat a kettle of water and pour it into a basin Then he would strip ot me just as clean as if I ashed in a bath - probably cleaner because I didn't finish up sitting in my own dirty water
For furniture, we had two chairs and a small table, and those, apart from a tiny chest of drawers, were all the home comforts we possessed They were all we needed
The lavatory was a funny little wooden hut standing in the field some way behind the caravan It was fine in su out there on a snowy day in winter was like sitting in a fridge
Immediately behind the caravan was an old apple tree It bore lovely apples that ripened in thethehs of the tree hung right over the caravan and when the wind blew the apples down in the night they often landed on our roof I would hear the thump thump thump above htenedthem