Favourite childhood games...

My favourite game as a child was building houses - odd for a traveller child, but I loved cottages and other people's houses, and I always wanted to live in one.

My favourite kind of house to build was the `bower', which I read about in What Katy Did. Katy and her family always seemed to me to have the best life possible, like the sisters in Little Women, producing plays, magazines and creating new games. To make a bower I would cut branchs and lay them over a sticks in a kind of lean-to hut.

As I mentioned earlier, when I could get bricks I made walls and even sectioned the interiors off into rooms, but I never had enough bricks to build up the walls so it was always just an outline.
I always wanted a pony when I was a child (I was one of those annoying little girls who read the `Jill' books, and anything by the Pullein-Thompson girls, Pat Smythe or Monica Edwards).

Before I got Bikenstein I rode an imaginary horse everywhere, and this was one of my favourite games. I did get chances to ride real ponies when I was growing up, but I have to confess I fell off a lot.

I was another scrapbook nut. My favourite scrapbooks came with a rainbow on the front cover and different rainbow coloured pages inside. I collected anything that looked at all interesting from Mum's magazines and my comics. The comics were another favourite thing - School Friend, Girl, Girl's Chrystal - even the Eagle, which was supposed to be for boys, but I loved Dan Dare.

Every Christmas I got the annuals that came out for the comics, jig saws, board games and art supplies - mainly pencils and sketchpads.

I got my love of crafts from my Dad, who used to sit in the evenings and make fine beadwork or leatherwork. We didn't have a TV until I was about 14, so crafts and the radio were important.
I was never much for sport, but I enjoyed playing wall tennis (where you play with a raquet and ball against a wall) and I loved being near the sea, messing about in boats or rock climbing.

My mother fostered my love of reading by introducing me to all the books she had loved (like Katie and Little Women) and signing us both up to a library chain run by B oots the Chemists, which people who travelled could use because you could return thebooks to any branch. Boots Booklovers' Library introduced me to Enid Blyton, Tove Jannsen, Joyce Lankaster Brisley, CS Lewis and Tolkien, as well as the pony books I loved so much.

Once, when my parents went to Iceland and I stayed with my Grandmother in London, they brought me back American paper dolls - I had never seen anythin g like them. The dolls were modelled on film stars (I think one was Rosemary Clooney) and I was consumed with envy of American children for being able to get such wonderful things.

But in spite of the paper dolls my favourite toys wrere always my huge collection of stuffed animals - my parents friends were always adding to the collection for my birthday and Christmas. It started simply enough with a toy bear given to me when I was a baby. I still have that bear and the one bought the following Christmas. They are very ragged now. But what could you expect, they are almost as old as me!