My parents moved to Love Lane in Pinner, Middlesex, in 1947 when I was one. It was once a lovers’ lane where people went courting or to take things further. There were two short parades of shops before the road turned into an ordinary suburban street full of semis and a Methodist church. At our end there was an electricity board showroom, a fresh fish shop, a newsagent, a bank and a cafe.

Mum, Connie, and Dad, Harold, were brought up in the Jewish East End tradition; Mum was born in this country, Dad was born in America, but their parents were mostly migrants from Romania and Poland.

Dad got talking to a man on a train who said there were cheap controlled-rent flats in Pinner. When rents were controlled, a rateable value of £40 meant that you couldn’t be evicted and landlords couldn’t raiseyour rent without some other fandango. Dad went to have a look at one flat and was amazed at how cheap it was.

No 6a Love Lane was over an estate agents until it changed to a babywear shop. It was in this weird 1920s pseudo-Elizabethan style, so it had leaded window panes and silly half-timbering on the outside. Dad liked the idea of something authentically old or new and couldn’t understand this pastiche thing that gripped the suburbs in the Twenties and Thirties.

Mum and Dad had both grown up in slum conditions in the East End. Mum complained of the bedbugs and the dirt. Love Lane must have been a luxury to them, but they yearned for a garden.

The flat was spacious and spread across three floors; the ground floor was on the same level as the shop, then you went up to the main living floor where there was a kitchen, front room and a lavatory. On the next floor were two bedrooms. I shared the room under the eaves with my older brother, Brian, who taught me everything from calculus to girls, including how to deal with our parents, the origins of the first world war and Mozart. Across the landing was my parents’ room and a big walk-in cupboard that always seemed to be full of glorious mysteries: there were gas masks and a box full of letters that Dad sent Mum when he was in the army.

There was no central heating so in winter it was a constant struggle to get warm. When you woke there was ice on the inside of the windows and your blanket would be cold and wet on top. We had a cast-iron stove in the front room and a gas fire in the kitchen. The moment the fire went off in the kitchen it was freezing. They tried to heat the corridor with paraffin heaters so the flat ponged of paraffin.

Mum always read to me until I could read myself. I went to the library every week and got books for Christmas and birthday presents. Dad was a secondary-school English teacher and Mum trained to be a primary school teacher in 1948. My parents were active in the NUT (National Union of Teachers); Mum was involved in the equal pay fight. Dad was told on the grapevine he couldn’t become head of department at one school because of his union and left-wing activities.

Dad decided to pull me out of English Lit classes at school and taught me at home in the front room. I remember discussing D H Lawrence, A E Housman and Rupert Brooke with him. The writing bug bit when I was about 15. My love of literature came from home.

I had a sense there was something different about my family. It was a confusing thing — something to do with left-wingness or Jewishness or that we lived in a flat and not in a proper suburban semi. With my parents as teachers, it set us a little apart too. We weren’t practising Jews, which added to the complication.

When I was about 11, I found out that Mum had had a baby boy who died before I was born. I was sitting in the front room with my brother going through some old photos. I asked, “Who’s that baby sitting on Mum’s knee — is it Brian or me?” Dad said it was somebody else. It was a mixture of whooping cough and pneumonia and it was during the war when they couldn’t get penicillin. Mum never mentioned the baby. In a way it was more shocking and awful because it was never talked about.

The Tories decontrolled rents in the late Fifties, which meant that landlords could raise rents more easily and increased their powers of eviction. It took some time for the property to be sold to a new landlord, the guy running the shop downstairs. We were chucked out in 1962. I remember a lot of panic and swearing.

Mum taught in southwest Herts and they offered a mortgage scheme for their key workers. We moved to an ex-gardener’s cottage in Rickmansworth. I think my parents were, in the end, pleased about it. They loved the garden. It led to a new stress over journey times — but that’s another story.

In The Colonie: A Memoir of Separation and Belonging by Michael Rosen, Penguin, £7.99.

Interview by Louise Johncox

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