No. 53.

No. 53, on the corner two doors down from my house, was always blindingly bright in the morning sun. Its impeccable white-painted timber was bedecked all around with white pin-striped blue canvas awnings, like butchers' aprons, over the windows. The white house held its corner tenaciously, as if stopping houses further up the hill from slipping down the block and falling off into the cross-street. Its angled front door gazed imperiously over the corner giving the house an oddly satisfying diagonal symmetry. A low brick wall ran an L around the two frontages. In the house lived the son and daughter-in-law of the owner of No. 55 next door. 

    Three doors up, we used the hill for rides. One day my brother pushed off on his billy cart and I went after him on a tricycle slightly too big for me. If I was four, he would be eight. Thirty-five seconds of electrifying descent and he took the corner in a sharp right, back wheels sliding out to correct the angle back into a perfect straight line. I used my pedals to control speed but with no gearing, the front wheel’s insane rotation threw my feet off. I missed the turn. The rear door of a car stopped me; I hit it flush. Half a second earlier I would have gone under the front of the car. 

    Hearing the bang and the rubber-burning screech of 1960s drum brakes, a trim, aproned, hair-bunned housewife - the daughter-in-law - ran out of the white house. The first thing I sensed after near-death by motor car, and still on the road, was her voice, strangely out of kilter with her appearance. She asked me if I was OK in a low parched voice, like a farmer's wife. 

    The hair-bunned low-voiced woman invited us to her three children's birthday parties regularly and fed us cakes and sandwiches as we sat in a sunroom overlooking the back garden, gazing at a shed at the top. One day we went into the shed, an Aladdin's Cave packed to the rafters around all four walls with small boxes. Occasionally one fell, either of its own accord or by interference - and break and spill, and thousands of buttons would scatter in the dim light with a tinkling sound like fairy dust. 

    The house was still there a few years ago; white paint peeling, awnings gone to faded flapping ribbons. Then the old lady died,and the house was bulldozed and townhouses in grey and black with pebbles for lawn sprung up overnight like mushrooms.