What my father would have called a ginnel, and my mother a snicket - and to think, that's the difference that 13 miles or so makes to Yorkshire dialect. After a day of deeply frustrating interactions with hospital and registrar offialdom (although, at last, there's now a medical certificate, I can't actually register Ray's death till next Tuesday, which is running it very close when the funeral is on Thursday - etc. But the funeral directors have been, as I keep reiterating, terrific) - after a frustrating and anxious day, I decided to walk down Wimbledon Hill to buy some essentials, like luggage labels to tie onto the handles of bags so that I have some vague idea of what might be inside them.
This particular snicket is between Ridgway Place and Sunnyside - on the right hand side, once upon a time, were some ruins of bombed houses, thick with rosebay willowherb, where my friend Vivien and I used to play at being WW2 soldiers. They were thought to be dangerous - full of things like unguarded cellars and rusty nails - so of course we disobeyed instructions, and moved stealthily around the collapsed brick and tangled weeds and brambles, and then crept back to her garden as invisibly as possible to dine on our "rations" - a filched Knorr's Chicken Stock cube, usually, dissolved in hot water from the tap.
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