I always knew when we were having a party at our house on Howden Drive.

Mum would be in the kitchen making egg sandwiches and sausage rolls, the furniture would be pushed back against the walls, and the good glasses would appear on the sideboard. I say good glasses, although I don't remember two of them ever looking alike.

The house was still quiet, but you knew it wouldn't be for long.

I had my own preparations to make.

Before Mum put the sausage rolls out, I would sneak into the kitchen, take one, and hide it at the very back of the fridge. I wasn't hungry. Well, I probably was. I usually was. But this particular sausage roll was for Sunday morning, when I would be awake long before the grown ups had recovered, and Patch, our Jack Russell, and I would take it on our morning walk.

It was a splendid arrangement, and one I saw no reason to discuss with Mum.

Then I would take up my position at the front window.

I think of that now when I see Eleanor Rigby waiting for me to come home, watching the street as though the fate of the entire household depended on my arrival. I must have looked much the same.

I could recognise people from a surprising distance. The way they walked, the shape of a familiar coat, the swing of an arm. Sometimes someone brought me chocolate, so naturally this possibility occupied a considerable amount of my thoughts. But I think I was even more excited about the people themselves.

A knock at the door, a rush of cold Liverpool air, and somebody calling out to Mum before they had even taken their coat off.

Bottles appeared from shopping bags. Records were placed beside the player. The hallway filled with voices, and our quiet little house began to wake up.

From where I stood, the party was mostly knees.

Trouser legs, sensible skirts, polished shoes, and the occasional glimpse of a stocking. I was waist high to nearly everyone in that living room, which meant I saw the evening from underneath. Glasses passed above my head. Cigarettes glowed between fingers. Handbags rested on the carpet, their contents offering tantalising glimpses into the mysterious world of grown women.

The gas fire glowed orange behind its metal grille, giving off that peculiar dry heat that warmed your shins while leaving your back cold. The carpet in front of it was worn flat, and the room smelled of furniture polish, warm pastry, tobacco, and someone's perfume.

To me, it was the richest room in Liverpool.

One of our neighbours wore an extraordinary amount of perfume. You could usually tell she was coming before she reached the front door. It was the sort of fragrance that entered a room several seconds before the person wearing it, and once she had taken off her coat, it settled into the curtains, the furniture, and quite possibly the wallpaper.

Mum maintained that it shouldn't be called perfume at all.

"It should be called poison."

Everyone agreed.

I thought this was rather unfair on the neighbour, although I had to admit that breathing became noticeably more difficult whenever she sat beside me.

I was fascinated by the things grown ups said about one another. They could complain about someone's perfume in the kitchen and then greet that same person in the hallway as though she were the Queen of England.

I assumed this was something I would understand when I was older.

I am still not entirely certain that I do.

Nobody needed a formal invitation. You simply came, bringing a record and a bottle.

The records gathered in a pile beside the player, their cardboard sleeves softened at the corners. The bottles stood on the sideboard. Carling Black Label for the men, Pernod for anyone feeling continental, and sherry for the aunties, who drank it from little glasses with the solemnity of people taking medicine.

The aunties were generally quite respectable when they arrived. This condition rarely lasted beyond the second glass.

Uncle Eddie came with his Hamlet cigars.

He would settle himself into a chair, sending thin blue ribbons of smoke towards the ceiling. Eddie was our storyteller. He could turn the smallest incident into an adventure, pausing at important moments, lowering his voice, and looking around the room to make certain everybody was listening.

They always were.

Sometimes someone would interrupt to suggest that events had not happened quite as Eddie described them. Eddie regarded such objections as an unnecessary interference with the entertainment. He would take another thoughtful puff and continue.

Everyone knew perfectly well the story was being exaggerated. They enjoyed it all the more for it.

Mum smoked John Player Special, from a black and gold packet that I thought looked rather grand.

I remember her one evening, cigarette resting in the ashtray, listening to a neighbour who had recently acquired a new set of dentures.

The dentures were proving troublesome. Apparently they made eating difficult, speaking uncertain, and smiling something of a gamble.

Mum listened patiently, nodding occasionally.

Meanwhile, the ash grew longer.

And longer.

It became a slender grey tower, balanced so delicately that I could hardly believe it remained standing. I watched with the concentration of a scientist observing an important experiment.

The neighbour continued discussing her teeth.

The ash trembled.

I wondered whether the dentures might actually fall out, which would have made the evening far more interesting.

Mum asked another sympathetic question.

Then, quite suddenly, the ash collapsed.

Nobody noticed.

By now the windows had misted over and the plates were emptying. The sausage rolls were disappearing at an alarming rate, although I could take some comfort in knowing that one was safely hidden in the fridge.

Then someone would put a record on.

The little crackle of the needle settling into the groove, then the first notes of a familiar song.

Queen, always. Chas and Dave, because no party in our house was complete without somebody attempting a Cockney accent with disastrous results. And ELO, whose Mr. Blue Sky seemed capable of bringing sunshine into the room even when the rain was running down the windows.

When that record came on, the grown ups changed.

Men who had spent the week coming home tired, with aching backs and rough hands, suddenly found the energy to dance. Arms went around shoulders. Glasses were raised. Somebody began singing with tremendous confidence and very little regard for the correct words, and the others joined in.

It amazed me that people who were normally so concerned about behaving properly could become so gloriously ridiculous simply because someone had put a record on.

The electricity ran on a meter in the hallway. You fed it fifty pence pieces, pushed the coin into the slot and twisted the knob until it dropped.

One night, right in the middle of a song, it ran out.

The record went first.

It slowed, the voice sinking lower and lower, until it groaned to a stop like a man sitting down after a long day.

Then the lights went out.

For a moment there was total darkness, and a room full of people who had been singing a second earlier went completely silent.

Then everyone started at once.

Has anyone got fifty pence?

Who's got fifty pence?

Somebody stood on somebody's foot. A glass went over. Hands patted pockets and handbags in the dark.

It was Tommy who found one.

Tommy wore black trousers that were never quite long enough for his legs, so there was always a stretch of sock showing between the hem and his shoe. He dug into his pocket, pulled out a fifty pence piece, and felt his way along the wall to the hallway.

We heard the coin drop.

We heard the knob turn.

The lights came on.

The needle caught.

The music came back.

And the whole room cheered as though Liverpool had just scored.

Tommy took a bow.

Jackie had a laugh you could hear from the street. It began with a little gasp, then grew into great rolling bursts that left her wiping her eyes and struggling to speak. Once Jackie started laughing, everyone else followed.

Sometimes I had no idea what was funny.

I laughed anyway.

Uncle Jimmy was particularly fond of a drink, and as the evening progressed his cheeks became pinker and his affection for everyone more obvious. He was also a wonderful source of information, although not all of it was particularly useful.

One Saturday evening, he told me something about the human body that I have never quite forgotten.

Apparently, even after a person has passed away, the body can continue to make the most unexpected noises.

I found this rather troubling.

Until then, I had assumed that once somebody died, they remained perfectly still and, more importantly, perfectly quiet.

Uncle Jimmy assured me otherwise.

Little pockets of air, he explained, could remain trapped inside the body and occasionally find their way out, sometimes with a rather surprising musical accompaniment.

Then he demonstrated.

"Prrrrrrp!"

The room erupted in laughter.

I was horrified.

Not so much by the noise itself, which I had encountered on numerous occasions, but by the thought of it coming from someone who was no longer with us.

I spent the rest of the evening wondering whether funerals were quite as solemn as they appeared.

To this day, I have never personally heard such a thing. Although, I must confess, whenever I find myself at a funeral, a small part of me remembers Uncle Jimmy.

And listens.

Jimmy had another great passion.

Rhinestone Cowboy.

The moment Glen Campbell began singing, he would look around the room until he found me, and hold out his hand.

I would take it, my little fingers disappearing into his enormous palm, and we would dance together on the worn carpet.

I cannot remember the steps, if there were any.

I remember his warm hand, the smell of beer, and the sound of everyone singing around us.

For those few minutes, I was not a little boy being tolerated at a grown ups' party.

I was part of it.

Sometimes I would stop and look around the room.

Uncle Eddie with his cigar. Jackie laughing. Tommy with his socks showing. Mum listening to somebody's troubles. Uncle Jimmy waiting for another song.

I knew almost nothing about their lives beyond our front door. I didn't know what they worried about or how difficult their week might have been.

I only knew that they were there, and that they seemed so happy to be together.

Outside, Liverpool was cold and damp, the streetlights shining on wet pavements. Inside, the gas fire glowed, the windows clouded with condensation, and the room was alive.

Nobody asked what anyone did for a living. There were no bosses, no titles, no important people. Nobody cared who had the nicer car, largely because nobody had a car worth admiring.

People were known by other things. The stories they told, the songs they loved, the particular sound of their laughter, whether they remembered to bring a bottle, and whether they noticed when somebody's glass was empty.

As the evening wore on, the ashtrays filled and the plates emptied. Someone would turn a record over. Somebody else would insist we had already heard it. Uncle Eddie would begin another story, and Jackie would start laughing before he had reached the interesting part.

Later in the evening, Mum would have had a few Pernods.

When she bent down to me, I could smell the aniseed on her breath, sweet and sharp, like the sweets from the corner shop.

Then somebody would put on Patsy Cline, and Mum would sing Crazy.

She was out of tune.

Not slightly.

Properly, gloriously out of tune.

Nobody minded.

There was something in the way she sang it, glass in hand, eyes half closed, meaning every word, that made the whole room go soft.

I didn't know then what the song was about.

I just knew I loved hearing her sing it.

I regarded bedtime as a deeply unfair arrangement.

The grown ups were allowed to remain downstairs with the music, the sausage rolls, and all the interesting conversations, while I was apparently expected to go upstairs and stare at the ceiling.

I could see no reasonable justification for this.

So I developed a strategy.

I made myself as inconspicuous as possible, sitting quietly on the carpet and hoping nobody would remember I existed.

It worked remarkably well until I fell asleep.

Eventually the room would begin to blur. The music seemed to grow softer, the voices more distant, and my eyelids impossibly heavy.

I would wander into the back room and curl up somewhere quiet.

Through the wall came the muffled sounds of the party. The music, the laughter, the clink of glasses, someone calling for another record, Uncle Eddie beginning a story that everybody knew would take some time.

I would lie listening, comforted by the knowledge that everyone was still there.

Sometime after midnight, a pair of arms would lift me.

I never properly woke.

I remember my cheek resting against a shoulder, the gentle movement of being carried upstairs, and the sudden coolness of the landing after the warmth of the living room.

The music grew fainter with every step.

Then the bed, the blankets, and the distant sound of laughter coming through the floor.

The party continued without me.

By Sunday morning, the house would be quiet again.

The records were back in their sleeves, the glasses waiting to be washed, the last few crumbs of pastry scattered across the table.

I would slip into the kitchen, open the fridge, and retrieve the sausage roll I had hidden the afternoon before.

Then Patch and I would set off.

The streets were almost deserted, the air cool against my face. I would eat my cold sausage roll as we walked, the pastry breaking into little flakes, while Patch trotted beside me with the unmistakable interest of a dog who knew perfectly well that food was involved.

I cannot remember whether I ever shared it with him.

Knowing Jack Russells, I suspect the decision may not have been entirely mine.

A few hours earlier, the house had been full of people. Now everyone was asleep, and I had the streets, the morning, and my sausage roll almost entirely to myself.

We didn't have much money.

I know that now.

Some of my friends at school had BMX bicycles and computers, things that seemed terribly exciting when I visited their houses. Our furniture was old, the carpet worn, and very little in our house would have been considered valuable.

Yet the word poor never seemed to belong to us.

I thought every house must be like ours.

Years have passed since those Saturday evenings.

I have travelled the world, cooked on television, and stood on stages before hundreds of people. I have been welcomed into magnificent rooms with chandeliers and tables laid with exquisite china. I have eaten extraordinary food and enjoyed wonderful company.

But sometimes, in the middle of a dinner with friends, I hear somebody laughing from the other end of the table, and for a moment I am back on that carpet.

I can see Tommy's socks.

I can hear Jackie laughing before Uncle Eddie has reached the end of his story.

I can smell Mum's perfume and the warm pastry from the kitchen.

And somewhere, Glen Campbell is singing Rhinestone Cowboy.

Most of the people in that room are gone now.

Uncle Eddie. Uncle Jimmy.

I would give a great deal to hear one more of Eddie's outrageous stories, or to feel Jimmy's enormous hand closing around mine as he pulled me onto the carpet.

Sometimes I wonder whether they had any idea how much those evenings meant to me.

I rather doubt it.

They were simply enjoying themselves.

A few people, something to eat, a record on. Somebody opening the door and making room for whoever happened to come through it.

Even now, when I come home, Eleanor Rigby is often waiting at the window, watching the street with such fierce concentration that I remember myself at the glass on Howden Drive, searching for the first familiar face.

I used to think I was waiting for the chocolate.

Perhaps I was.

But I suspect it was the people.

The familiar voices. The laughter. The wonderful feeling of our little house filling up.

I was carried to bed on those nights, half asleep, with the party still going below me.

I think I've been carrying that room ever since.

If you'd like to hide one at the back of your own fridge, the recipe is here.