By CARLO GEBLER
Let me tell you of the December day in 1899, sixty years ago, I can never, ever, forget ...
I was fourteen. We had no money. We couldn't afford our own clock. So when I got the job on the railways, my mother asked Pat Sweeney, the local
knocker-up, to wake me every morning at four o'clock. She had to pay him an ha'penny a week.
The knocker had a stick with a bit of metal on the end. He came at the time you said and banged on your window. Tap, tap, tap, I heard - that morning, on the bottom right-hand window pane. The other panes were missing and patched with cardboard. I was in the big bed with my brothers, Peter and James. We were lying like spoons, three in a row. My two big sisters were snoring in their bed on the other side of the room.
Publisher: Mammoth
Price: $16.95
Age group: 10 plus years
