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Within the confines of a central London suburb, even in the 1940s, the smallest promise of the rural idyll was precious.

Not that the planners had failed to strive to lift the gray and dusty urban spirits. The flaking Plane trees with their big leaves and knobbly circular fruits carpeted the pavements with gold in autumn. These fruits were capable of being crushed into a precious commodity known as "itching powder" - a bonus for small boys, who would slip it down the backs of small girls where (if they were lucky) it would cause them such discomfort that they would rip off their dresses to rid themselves of the pain.

Sycamores dropped their winged seeds which, once collected, formed the stuff of competitions as the children climbed onto precarious shed roofs and old walls to drop them in a game of aerial pooh-sticks.

To a child of rising four years of age, the garden becomes a wilderness, the scruffy park a jungle.

Harold lived all the warmer months in what to him was the great outdoors. In reality it was an L-shaped garden on a corner plot, attached to one of those three-storey Victorian houses that were once slums and now fetch silly money among the yuppie set. His family occupied the ground-floor flat, which meant he had immediate access to the garden.

There were no other children in the house, so the garden was his kingdom and he the sovereign of it. He did, it is true, have to share it: he shared it with rows of runner beans and lines of pea-sticks; with cabbages and carrots drawn up with military precision; with a hen-house where golden-brown hens produced golden-brown eggs under the eye of an arrogant, wattled Chanticlere.

On the short side of the L there was a territory into which he was allowed only with adult supervision; a territory of flower garden laid out, when one could get them, in patterns of red and white and blue bedding plants. A long, narrow section of the garden bordering the roadside was totally out of bounds because it has been taken over by the local council and turned into a concrete shelter.

For this was 1944, with the War on a knife-edge.

Harold spent most of his days in the garden, largely unaware of the deprivations of rationing because it was the only life he knew, and but vaguely conscious that the military lines of vegetables and the produce of the chicken run were essential to an economy so meagre that it was barely above subsistence.

In his garden world he became obsessed with the birds that scraped a living in that urban sprawl.

There was the handsome cock blackbird with its glossy feathers and yellow bill that would sit up on the chimney pot and sing the summer days away, its mellifluous notes at odds with the chugging of the Bedford trucks and Ford saloons passing along the road outside the high walls of the garden.

Beyond these walls, invisible behind a fringe of mature trees, was a school. If he was lucky, the song thrush that lived in this travesty of woodland would drop onto the grass in the garden after a shower, collecting snails from around the vegetable patch and hammering them on an old brick that had once marked the edge of a path that was now long since forgotten. It was an image straight out of an Enid Blyton nature book and it thrilled his heart.

Once, he asked if he could have a bird in a cage, so that - when eventually he was forced by the weather, or darkness, or the illogical demands of adults to return to the house - he could keep some memento of the outside world inside. But the family was too poor, too much under pressure from the war, to provide such fripperies and his request was refused. It was refused whenever he asked subsequently.

Harold pondered long and hard on how he could keep a caged bird in the teeth of such opposition. Being a resourceful and quite intelligent child, albeit a loner, he hit on an idea.

Waiting, as children learn to do, for a moment when adults are mellow and off-guard, he broached the subject one more time. The same old refusal followed.

But Harold knew from his private explorations of the garden wilderness that, in the little building that had once been a privy, where a million spiders drowned in the water in the unused pan and turned it black with their rotting corpses, that there was an old bird-cage. How it got there he did not know, but the spring on the door almost worked and it had food and water pots and two little wooden dowels for perches. Maybe it had been abandoned by some Victorian maid when the house was vacated for flats. But it offered a solution.

'If I catch a bird,' said Harold, 'and I can find a cage to put it in; then can I have one?'

The sheer childish fantasy of this request and impossibility of its ever coming about, forced a grudging agreement, and he saw the smiles and titters of the adults as they conceded the impossible and laughed at his quaintness. Adults were, he thought, a disingenuous lot.

For what Harold had not revealed was that he had spent hours and hours working on the plan, and its chance of success was - to his childish mind - almost beyond question.

Next to the chicken run where he collected the eggs was an elder bush. In that environment and to the eyes of a child who has never got closer to the wild than the Old Kent Road, this bush was a whole universe of vegetation. In it the noisy, bullying house sparrows had learned to sit and wait around for the chickens' feeding time. It soon became obvious to Harold that, if he dropped a little of the bran close to the mesh of run, the sparrows would hop in to steal it from under the prodding beaks of the chicken. If he did this habitually they would learn to trust him.

Now this provided an opportunity. He watched the technique of the sparrows' theft. They would fly the foot or two from the elder onto the mesh of the run. But they had to close their wings as they passed through the mesh, so they would balance there for a split second before dropping onto the floor of the chicken coop, snatching some seed, and exiting by the same route.

Harold cultivated the sparrows with little morsels of tempting grain, waiting around by the chicken run so that they grew used to his presence. Then he decided that today was the day.

To cut a long story short, he waited; the cock sparrow flew down within an inch of his face and paused on the mesh; a lightning childish hand shot out and grabbed its tail; Harold carried the bird triumphantly to the cage in the privy and put it in; then he took it indoors.

Consternation struck. Of course, the disappointed Harold was not allowed to keep the bird; but then he had half expected that the promises of adults would be honoured in the breach. But it did force the issue and, some days later, a cheerful canary appeared in the cage and became his constant indoor companion.

The bird was lemon yellow, with none of those brown feathers that some specimens have. Its primaries were almost white, its eye jet, and its bill a pale horn. It ate seed from the little pot, with maize and strings of millet. In return for this bounty it trilled and bustled about its cage so vocally that it had to be covered at night. But in the day it sat happily in the living room window and tinkled its sweet notes at the sun.

Thus Harold passed into a new era of his life; the year wore on in a golden autumn that allowed him to spend many waking hours in the wilderness garden, stalking the butterflies and listening to the sparrows in the ivy that strangled the side wall of the house. When he came indoors the floral wallpaper and brown paint of the drab little sitting room was enlivened by the lemon plumage and sweet cadences of the canary.

But a far-away dictator had other ideas. The raids on London, always a threat, became more intense. One could walk to the shops one day amid an unbroken rank of houses, and the next there would be two or three gaps as if some invisible dentist had extracted houses like teeth in the darkness.

At first, the raids were mainly confined to the night. Harold's family, unwilling to join the occupants of the public shelter, spent increasing numbers of nights in the cellar under the house. Approached down thirteen rickety wooden steps, this was a huge underground area where, through a round manhole by the front door step the coal merchant would shoot half a ton of coal from time to time. It was thus dirty, lit by a single electric bulb, the haunt of huge black spiders, occupied by mice that scurried in the darkness. Camp beds were ranged between the supporting pillars.

Harold would lie on his camp bed in the pitch blackness and hear the planes roll in over London; could soon tell the friendly Spitfires from the grinding Heinkels; learned the sound of the doodle-bug; held his breath when the whine ceased; understood that if you heard the explosion you were still alive in the terror of the darkness.

The monotonous grind of the war wound on. Dull fear was replaced at intervals by sheer panic; like the day when a teenage relative was chased up the road to the garden gate by a German pilot who was machine-gunning anyone who moved before streaking his way back from the docks to the Channel and home.

Night time raids were augmented by day-time operations. They spent more and more time in the hateful cellar.

On one particular night the bombs rained around them as they cowered in the darkness. A huge explosion, and a rumble like the Armageddon, told without the need to emerge from the cellar, how a house close by would be another gap in the jaw of the road to the shops, how more neighbours would no longer be seen buying their milk and their newspapers.

Harold lay in the darkness. Time in the cellar was eternal night. When the all-clear sounded and they emerged into the blinding daylight it was nearly mid-day. The sun was shining from an azure sky, and the blackbirds sang as if welcoming creation.

In the living room the black-out curtain had disappeared, and the window, despite its criss-cross of sticky tape, had been blown into a thousand pieces and sand-blasted into the walls and furniture. The floor crunched with broken glass like the surface of a frozen puddle in the winter park, when the children play on its surface in their wellingtons. The canary's cage still hung in the window-space and was dancing in the autumn breeze; but the dance was a requiem not a celebration, and the canary's lemon feathers were blooded and cold.

There welled up in Harold's consciousness a revelation: a revelation about the inherent evil of someone who could propel faceless weapons to annihilate an innocent and beautiful bird, and for the first time in his young life he swore revenge. Which just goes to show that the demise of something even as ephemeral as one canary can signal the death of innocence.

NB I have changed my name in the story for the purposes of transmission. This is my story & I am Harold

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