It was the windiest Saturday morning Beatrice Higgins and I could ever remember. Never had we seen so many conkers as lay scattered in the roadway and on the pavement, blown down from Mickey Owen's great horsechestnut tree. Our pockets overflowed with them so that we bulged out at the sides like two fat donkeys. Every Saturday morning we would wait together in Green Lane while our friends, Hope and Felicity Mitten, finished practising their duet on the piano. While we waited we ran up and down past the houses, beating out with a stick on the iron railings high-spirited tunes of our own. They were tunes that were part of the autumn weather - of flying leaves and bonfires, of dipping branches and warm, gusty winds. We felt light and twirling and very happy and Beatrice Higgins skipped through her ropes a hundred times without once stopping.

We liked Green Lane when it looked blown about and untidy. Mickey Owen's house, with its dirty windows and curtains and bricks covered over with creeper, was the only house which kept a wild look at the year round. But then Mickey Owen was supposed to be some kind of witch. On the very rare occasions when she came to stand at her front gate she wore a cloth cap with the peak turned backward and an old hunting jacket. It was sad for Mickey Owen because everyone knew that she had no roof to her mouth, which made her say strange things in a strange way, like calling herself Mickey Owen instead of Mrs Owen. But this morning her dirty bit of worn garden was transformed by the fallen creeper leaves into a startling patch of red and gold. They had piled up in a little drift by the front door and one golden leaf had settled on the head of Mickey Owen's stone pelican.

Beatrice Higgins picked up some more conkers and, her pockets being full, pushed them inside her tam o'shanter and up the legs of her navy blue knickers. She was very proud of her conker collection and her greatest hope was to have one bigger than that of the pale little boy, Bertram Mackintosh. Bertram lived at the far end of Green Lane and spent his Saturday mornings swinging away on his old creaking swing., Sometimes he stood on his head on the seat, waving his legs in the air like a clown. His conkers he laid out in a long, straight row on his bedroom window sill so that everyone who passed could see how fine and big they were. Bertram liked to do quiet things alone, like sticking transfers on his arms and his legs. Once he came to school with a kangaroo stamped on one knee and a sailing ship on the other. But when Beatrice Higgins and Bertie Sidebottom appeared in class with pictures of lions on their foreheads a note had been sent home to all the mothers forbidding transfers in school for ever.

Over the railings we could see Bertram's mother, very tall and thin, like Mother Hubbard, raking the leaves into brown heaps. Bertram was wearing new winter boots and a white muffler. When he saw us watching him he showed off, swinging up and down in a fierce manner and, behind him on the wind, the two ends of his muffler stuck out so that it looked as if he had grown a pair of white wings. And, because the wind  

and the creaking trees made us feel queer, bold happiness, we shouted as loudly as we could, louder than the wind, "Silly old Bertram Mackintosh'. But all Bertram did was to put out his tongue and go on swinging harder than ever.

About dinner time every Saturday the shy little girl called Elsie Stokes would turn into Green Lane, walking beside her father who pushed a wheelbarrow. Elsie's father has an allotment where he grew potatoes and flowers and vegetable marrows. If there were not many vegetables to bring home Elsie would sit in the wheelbarrow with the spade and rake holding a bunch of sweetpeas or michaelmas daisies. Elsie was very shortsighted. At school, to see the better what had been written on the blackboard, she would spread her two longest fingers against each side of her nose and peer through them like someone looking down a telescope. She lived in the house in Green Lane which had a monkey tree in the garden, and behind it, in the front sitting room, sat Elsie's old grandfather, Mr Bugler, who spent most of the day making spills out of pieces of coloured paper. On summer afternoons, when the window was open, we could see Mr Bugler dipping his pen in a large glass inkpot to write across each bundles of spills the date of the day when he finished making them. The bundles were tied up with thin green thread. Then, once a week, Elsie would pack them into a basket and hand in a bundle at the Green Lane back doors and everybody was very grateful to Mr Bugler for helping to save matches.

At the house next door Felicity and Hope Mitten were still playing their Saturday morning duet. It was called the 'Exile of Napoleon on St Helena'. People often wondered where it took Felicity. She never made mistakes, but just went on and on looking out to some place far beyond Green Lane and the music book. Unlike Hope, who could never forget she was sitting on the piano stool and wasting time, Felicity made St Helena sound a very grand and lonely place. The practising of it was most important because, in December, they were to play it at a concert of the Young Missionaries Society in the Sunday School Hall. Beatrice Higgins was to recite a long piece of poetry about the sea and the wind. It was 'The Wreck of the Hesperus' and there were twenty-two verses to learn. Beatrice knew eight by heart already and it was not yet October. 'Come hither! Come hither! my little daughter, and do not tremble so; For I can weather the roughest gale, that ever wind did blow...' We were all to wear new frocks of peach voile and Felicity was to pass round the collection box.

As we waited with our noses pressed against the Mittens' garden railings the wind lifted our serge skirts until they spread about us like navy blue umbrellas. With each strong blow there came a strange, sighing noise from Elsie Stokes' monkey tree. Across on the other pavement Bertram Mackintosh was trying to bowl his hoop straight and each time it fell over he pretended not to care. "Silly old hoop, silly old hoop," shouted Beatrice, who did not like Bertram Mackintosh. It certainly was a very windy Saturday morning.