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Snow has fallen upon deep snow. The sky, lavender, grey and deep scarlet-rose, is heavy with more. Cars, barely one every half-hour, make their way slowly home, their tyres crunching on the freezing snow. The white boulder I rolled yesterday and left on the grass verge shines amber under the street lamp. My mittens are stiff. My face numb. Everything glistens.

There are shouts from the boys up the road firing snowballs at one another. I am playing alone, about a hundred yards away from them. My mother is watching me through the dining-room window. She looks worried. I am the proprietor of an imaginary cheese shop, carving slices of Cheddar from the huge rock of snow lit by the street lamp. As I ask my next customer what they want, I catch my mother's eye. I smile and wave at her and she looks down,
embarrassed. The front door opens and she calls to me.

‘It's time to come in now.'

‘Oh, can't I stay out just a bit longer? There's a queue.'

‘You must be freezing, you've been out there for hours. Anyway, it'll be dark soon.'

‘Were you watching for Daddy?'

‘No, I was watching you. What game were you playing?'

‘Grocers. I've been selling cheese like Percy Salt does in his shop.'

She comes out and looks anxiously up the road at the boys having fun, yelling and running and sliding in the snow. Five of them, four from my own class. She looks disappointed. A cold little smile. She puts her arm round me, wincing at the frozen hairs on my cold duffel coat.

‘Come on in, I've made a crumble.'

Even bad crumble is good. The perfect one is that whose juices have bubbled up through the pale rubble of the crust, staining it deep claret or gold. The ultimate is that which has damsons or greengages underneath and comes with a jug of yellow cream.

We chip away at the dry, gritty powder that fills the top third of the Pyrex baking dish. Sweet sawdust. The apples below have fallen into a watery mush. They are our own Bramleys from one of the three trees in the garden, which have been stored, wrapped in pages from the
Telegraph
, in a sack in the garage since September. Mother throws half the apple away when she peels it. She cuts in short thick
strokes, as if she was cutting chips instead of paring the delicate skin from a fruit. She cooks the apples first, with a heaped spoon of white sugar and another of water, until they are starting to froth. Then she tips them into the dish. She takes down the yellow drum of Lion brand cloves from the shelf in the pantry, prises off the rusty lid and takes out two little stalks. These she tucks deep into the apple. Then she rubs the butter into the flour until it looks like dry breadcrumbs, and stirs in the sugar. This is tipped on to the apple and then the whole thing is put in the cool oven of the Aga.

The juice of Mother's crumble never bubbles up through its crust. The rough, uneven pebbles so vital for a perfect crumble are, in her version, as fine as sand. They are deep beige, almost the colour of a digestive biscuit. The bottom inch of crumble is sodden with apple juice. There is no cream, no custard.

Even bad crumble is good.

I never bought bags of sweets. They carried an implication that they were to be shared. A Mars bar or Milky Way carried no such baggage, and so that was what I bought with my pocket money.

A good way round sharing was to buy Sherbet Fountains – those tubes of acidic white powder wrapped in red-and-yellow
paper with a stick of liquorice poked down the centre. You dipped the liquorice into the sherbet and sucked it. Not only did its staggeringly acid sweetness make your eyes water, you could have it all to yourself. At least I did. No one ever asked to suck my liquorice.

For some reason Sherbet Fountains were considered girls' stuff. Like Refreshers and Love Hearts. Nobody told me this until I had been seen dipping my little black stick into the depths of the fountain every day for a month or more. Real boys didn't eat Sherbet Fountains.

The only sweets I offered round were Love Hearts. Love Hearts were real girly sweets. Everyone knew that. But they could be very useful. I am sure I wasn't the only one to cunningly rearrange the sweeties in their packet so that, when I offered them round, the message – You're Cute, Kiss Me, Big Boy, etc. – got to the one intended. Invariably, my carefully constructed plan would misfire. There was always someone who would screw it up by taking two.

Josh is showing me how to grow radishes in a corner of the garden that my father says is mine. Last year I planted cosmos, pink, white and deep-red daisies that danced on fine stems, and Indian Prince marigolds that had simple, single flowers and floppy leaves. Josh has raked away the
tangle of their dried stems and seed heads, dumped them on the compost heap and raked the soil flat. He opens up the packet of seeds and passes them over to me. I empty them out into my hands and sprinkle them in long lines, but the seeds are so small they are dropping in tiny heaps.

‘There's too many seeds and they're a bit too close together but we can thin them out when they come up,' says Josh.

Two weeks later some of the seeds have germinated, I am lying on my stomach on the grass looking at the baby leaves that have come up, a mixture of gaps and tufty bunches. I hear Josh's bike in the drive and then the garage doors rattling open. I sit there gazing at the leaves for a minute or two then walk over to the garage. Josh is getting changed. His denim jacket is on the seat of his Triumph, and he is just undoing his belt. Josh's white-T shirt is out of shape and so short it barely comes down to his belly button. It looks like he's had it for years. Mum would have thrown mine out before it got like that. He pulls his jeans off and lays them over the bike. He is standing there in nothing but his T-shirt. Josh never seems to wear any underwear. He walks round to the back of his bike and takes a pair of thin, faded shorts out of the shiny black box on the back and pulls them on, then, without putting on any shoes, he picks me up in his arms and we jog out to the garden.

‘Come and see my radishes, they're huge,' I say, exaggerating slightly.

Josh pulls a set of leaves gently between his thumb and fingers. At the end of the thin stem is a tiny pink radish, just big enough to be recognisable. ‘Eat it, go on,' he urges. The little root is crunchy, hot, mustardy, exciting, like my mouth is on fire. I don't know whether I like it or not. Josh laughs and starts picking out many more of the seedlings. He clasps them in his hand and takes them back to his bike, where he puts them in a little plastic bag and lays them gently in the black box on the back of his bike. ‘They're for my salad,' he says. Holding them gently, protectively, as you might a baby bird.

This week we have picked about twenty radishes, long, thin ones with white tips and fuchsia-pink skins, the insides as crisp and white as baby's teeth. I am still not sure if I like them or not but Dad seems to. He sort of wells up when I give them to him. ‘Go on, eat them then,' I plead.

‘Later.'

When we found the radishes in the fridge a week later, shrivelled, bendy, their leaves yellow, I am not sure who was more upset, Josh or me. Dad hadn't really been in the house much, and I forgot to tell Mum they were there. After that I didn't really pick any more. I told Josh he could have them all but he didn't seem to want them either.

Having people to do both the garden and the housework was unusual round our way. Most of our neighbours either mowed their back lawns and dug their vegetable patches, though some had wild gardens, rough lawn with overgrown
brambles and purple loosestrife at the far end. Front gardens, on the other hand, were always tidy and smart. An orderly mix of heather, conifers and privet hedges. The Marks & Spencer's grey suit of gardens. In summer, white alyssum was kept in pert balls and gentian-blue lobelia trailed gently along the edge of immaculate lawns no bigger than a duvet. Purple aubrietia was pruned into neat nests that cascaded from rockery walls. A dog turd would have been cleaned up before it was barely cold.

No one in our road was unemployed, save gruff old Mr Manley, who was as old as God and looked rather like Monet, and Mr Saunders, who had hurt his leg at work and now spent his day practising the clarinet. Few, if any, of the women worked. Everyone had children of more or less the same age but the parents all seemed so old, with everyone in their forties and fifties. There were no babies, no single mothers, no young, childless couples. No blacks, no homosexuals, no foreigners. The only pets were our Labrador, Mr Manley's black Scottie and a few assorted guinea pigs and hamsters. I think the Butlers had a tabby cat. Neat, calm, polite, distant, with only the children ever setting foot in one another's houses.

One day I came in cold and wet through. My short trousers stuck to my legs and my socks had worked their way down to my ankles. My feet squidged in my sandals as I walked. Josh grabbed his towel. ‘You're soaked,' he laughed. ‘Come on, let's get you into some dry clothes.' He followed me upstairs and he pulled my T-shirt up over
my head, then slid my shorts and little white Y-front pants down. He rubbed me all over with the towel, growling like a tiger, tickling me till I couldn't stop laughing. Josh dried my arms, making me hold them high above my head, and then my legs, which were shivering and covered in little white pimples. He dried my thighs and then held my cold, wet dick in his right hand, stroking it dry with his towel, tenderly, protectively, like he was holding a frightened mouse.

We lived in a world of tinned fruit. There were tinned peaches for high days and holidays, fruit cocktail for everyday and tinned pears for my father who said they were better than fresh. There were apricots and segments of mandarin oranges that turned up in orange jelly and, once, figs, which nobody really liked. On one occasion we tried mango but my father said it tasted fishy. I wasn't allowed to try. ‘You won't like it.'

The highlight was not the peaches that we ate when someone special came to tea, but the diced delights of fruit cocktail. Grey cubes of grainy pear, semi-cubes of peach, ridged chunks of pineapple and, best of all, lipstick-red maraschino cherries all floating in a divinely sweet syrup. We ate it from red Pyrex dishes, the fruit poking up like a multicoloured rockery in a pool of Ideal milk.

‘If you really want to, dear,' was my mother's answer for anything I wanted to do that she would rather I didn't. This was her stock answer to my question: Can I make a fruit sundae? By make I meant assemble. My fruit sundae was a gloriously over-the-top mess of strawberry ice cream, tinned fruit cocktail, maraschino cherries and any nuts I could lay my hands on. I always saved a cherry for the centre. Believe me when I tell you it was the envy of all who set eyes upon it.

Sometimes I would come home at lunchtime to find my mother in her bedroom, curtains drawn. If I listened at the crack in the door I could hear her breathing, slow, peaceful breaths with a slight rasp coming from somewhere deep in her chest. On those days Mum, Mrs Poole, who knows who, would set out something for my lunch: ham salad; cold roast pork with pickled walnuts and crackling; a Birds Eye Chicken Pie ready to go into the oven; cold roast beef and salad. I didn't enquire about the provenance of these meals. They just appeared and I ate them and that was that.

One day I came home at lunchtime to find my mother had done chops and peas. It was her knee-jerk meal. When she was late back from the shops, her green Beetle with dented left wing still warm on the drive, the chops would
be juicy with the thinnest line of pink running through their middle. If she had got started early I might as well be eating the sole of my father's brown brogues.

That day the chops were moist and sweet, a thin crust from the frying pan on their edges and fat the colour of amber. There was a bone to chew, tantalisingly browned. Best of all she had done little roast potatoes just for me. OK, so they didn't have the gorgeous benefit of being cooked round the roast but they were still scrunchy round the edges, fluffy inside and so hot I had to jiggle them round my mouth so they didn't burn my tongue.

‘I'm sorry, darling,' she said, rubbing softly at an imaginary stain on the kitchen table, ‘but I think you're going to have to stay for school dinners. It's just a bit too much for me at the moment. As soon as I'm better you can come back home again. I'm sorry, lamb chop.'

It was like she had just taken out a gun and shot me.

‘No thank you,' I say to the tight-lipped prefect who is ladling great splodges of ivory-grey tapioca into shallow bowls and passing them round the table, ‘I'm full.' Her eyes narrow and one corner of her mouth turns up. ‘Sorry, you have to eat it, it's the rules.' The guy opposite me, who smells like digestive biscuits and I think lives on the council estate I am not allowed to go to, is wolfing his down like
it was warm treacle sponge or trifle, or maybe chocolate sponge pudding. But it's not. This is the most vile thing I have ever put in my mouth, like someone has stirred frogspawn into wallpaper paste. Like porridge with bogeys in it. Like something an old man has hockled up into his hanky.

When I get home I am going to tell Mum to write a note letting me off this stuff. The stew wasn't that bad, apart from the swedes which were bitter and something flabby that could have been fat but felt more like a big fat slug. I spread the spittle-coloured glue around my dish right up the sides in the hope I will have to eat less of it. ‘You must show me your bowls before you leave the table,' says Tight Lips, ‘They must be clean, otherwise you'll be here all afternoon.'

Considering we have an outdoor PE lesson this afternoon, staying in the warm, playing with a bowl of rice doesn't seem such a bad option. At home, going without pudding is a punishment, at school eating it is. Yesterday's sponge with bright red jam and desiccated coconut wasn't so bad, neither was the chocolate blancmange with pretend cream and hundreds and thousands on it. But this is disgusting. Everyone has finished and is waiting for me, glaring at me, wanting to go out and play. ‘Oh, hurry up, will you, I've got netball practice,' says Tight Lips. And so, with that I push my bowl and spoon over to the Digestive Biscuit guy and say, ‘You eat it.' He glances furtively at Little Miss Netball Practice, who nods a mean little nod and the evil stuff was gone quicker than you could sneeze.

And so that was it. Over the next few weeks Digestive Biscuit boy hoovered up egg-and-bacon flan, tomato flan, liver and cabbage, liver and mashed swede, mince with carrots, mince with boiled marrow, something-I'm-not-quite-sure-of-in-white-sauce, pink blancmange with very thick skin on it, yellow blancmange with very thick skin on it, gravy with a very thick skin on it and chocolate semolina which even he said looked like something that had come out of a baby's arse.