3 Ivanhoe Road Liverpool 17

I lived here from the ages of 6 to 11 (1957 to 1962) Upstairs the Eves and the Taylors, downstairs in the basement my great aunt Violet and husband "Coxie" (so called 'cause he was a coxswain on the boats). We lived on the ground floor.

Those bricked up windows behind me the cellars where I descended awash with apprehension whistling 'Davey Crockett' to fetch coal. sometimes we had none left or I couldn't scrape it up with the crappy bent ragged-edged rusty shovel we had off the uneven sweating black bumpy floor - i can smell the damp coal dust and the mildew as I write this - so I'd steal into the well-lit smooth-floored cellars of my neighbours and help myself to a bucket of theirs - higher grade better burn smoother shape ....Ours predictably low-grade pre-cambrian tarpit spitting hissing massive dripping, veined with non-combustible shale and decorated with a bas relief of a ceolocanth - a mystery that, how they did it,how they spelt it.

Stark terror sometimes felt in this house. Place palpable with it - not just the cellars with their uneven stone stairs but in the room behind my left shoulder unexplained bangs, breathing, rustlings, various visions and a glimpsed figure of a man passing through the locked room witnessed by my father and mother.

Two sisters, former residents, who died in the blitz, seen in an old-fashioned bed in a strangely refurnished room by my 12 year old cousin Philip shortly after he suffered terrible burns when his nightdress caught alight from the coal fire.

It was made of some now illegal fabric spun out of napalm and semtex - the bastards who invented it, manufactured it, and inflicted it on an unsuspecting public; and the ministry bastards who oversaw and approved all and made sure my cousin got not penny one in compensation but struggled through life scarred physically and emotionally - they got off scot-free, their consciences untroubled by their own staggering incompetence.

Us then defenceless - without voice, without redress - poor, afraid, decent and deferential. But not any more. I'd tear their non-existent bollocks off if clocks were back. No wonder the house has the look of Borley Rectory. As soon as i think about it the ghosts come out.