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wet, but even if I was careful, the other children often splashed and I got soaked. One time Ga thought my knickers were so sopping wet I’d be better off without them, so she pulled my dress on, whipped my knickers off, and walked home with them clutched in a soggy parcel in her hand. We encountered Mrs Wilton, her next-door neighbour, on the way home.
    ‘Look at this saucepot!’ said Ga, twitching up my dress to show my bare bottom.
    Then she waved my wet knickers in the air while she and Mrs Wilton laughed their heads off. I was mortified. I was worried Mrs Wilton might think I’d
wet
my knickers and then she’d tell her children, Lesley and Martin, and they’d think me a terrible baby.
    I liked the trips to the paddling pool, but the best treat of all was a walk to Peggy Brown’s cake shop in Surbiton. There’s a health food shop on the site now, but in the long-ago days of my childhood the only health supplements we had were my free orange juice for vitamin C (delicious) and cod liver oil for vitamins A and D (disgusting) and some black malty treacle in a jar that my grandpa licked off a spoon every day.
    Our concept of eating for health was a little skewed too: a fried-egg-and-bacon breakfast was considered the only decent way to start the day so long as you were lucky enough to have the right number of coupons; white bread and dripping was a nutritious savoury snack; coffee was made with boiled full-cream milk and a dash of Camp; and as long as you ate your bread and butter first then you always tucked into a cake at tea time.
    Ga made proper cooked meals every day. She rolled her own pastry and made wonderful jam with the berries from the back garden, but I can’t remember her baking cakes. On ordinary days we had pink and yellow Battenburg cake or sugary bath buns from the baker’s near Kingston market – but once a week we went to Peggy Brown’s special cake shop.
    They were fancy cakes with marzipan and butter cream and little slithers of glacé cherry or green angelica. They had exotic names: Jap cakes, coconut kisses, butterfly wings. There were tarts with three different jams – raspberry, apricot and greengage, like traffic lights. My favourites were little individual lemon tarts with a twirl of meringue on top.
    Excellent as they were, the cakes were only incidental. We went to Peggy Brown’s to look at the shop windows. The owner had a vast collection of dolls, from large Victorian china dolls as big as a real child down to tiny plastic dolls not very different from my Woolworths girls.
    Each season Peggy Brown did a magnificent display: false snow and a tiny Christmas tree in winter; Easter eggs and fluffy bunnies in the spring; real sand and a painted blue sea in summer; red and gold leaves and little squirrels in autumn. Each season every single doll had a new outfit. They had hoods and mufflers and velvet coats, Easter bonnets and party frocks, swimming costumes and tiny buckets and spades, Fair Isle jumpers with matching berets and miniature wellington boots.
    Ga and I gazed and gazed. Ga worked out how Peggy Brown had designed the costume, cut the pattern, sewn the seams. I rose up, strode straight through the glass and squatted amongst the dolls. We made a snowman or stroked the rabbits or paddled in the sea or kicked the crackly autumn leaves until Ga gave me a little tug. I’d back out of the glass into the real world and we’d go home and eat our Peggy Brown cakes for tea.
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    Which of my books features an entire collection of treasured dolls?
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    It’s
Lizzie Zipmouth
.
    Dolls! Old china dolls in cream frocks and pinafores and little button boots, soft plush dolls with rosy cheeks and curls, baby dolls in long white christening robes, lady dolls with tiny umbrellas and high heels, a Japanese doll in a kimono with a weeny fan, dolls in school uniform and swimming costumes and party frocks, great dolls as big as me sitting in real wicker chairs, middle-sized dolls in row after