We never had a garden but we did have a small allotment not far from the flat. It was about thirty feet wide and fifty feet long as I remember. Prior to the estate being built it was a home of rest for horses. Horses being horses and doing what horses do there were high hopes of some well manured plots just ready for cultivation. Well we must have been very unlucky or the horses perhaps were housed elsewhere because our allotment proved to be mostly London clay. My father set to work with great enthusiasm in 1935 but by 1937 it had been left to my mother as yet another domestic chore and she soldiered on as best she could. Between her efforts and my willing but not very useful support that plot produced potatoes, dwarf beans, peas, onions, cabbage, lettuce and chrysanthemums throughout the war. Sometime around 1947, not long before varicose ulcers forced mum to give up gardening, she lost her engagement ring on that allotment. She was terrified of what my father would say but, as I guessed, he never noticed and she never told him. So the allotment fell to me to look after and I managed to keep it going although not with a great deal of enthusiasm. As the need for the produce as a supplementary food source declined I began to experiment with more flowers and soon I was growing petunias, asters, carnations and dahlias along with the chrysanthemums, golden rod and delphiniums that my mother planted. Tending to these one day in 1960 I found this rather grubby ring laying upon the surface of the soil. It transpired to be mother's lost engagement ring which she washed and replaced upon her finger. My father did not comment but he was still unaware that it had ever gone missing. There is a romantic for you! Len