Rockingham Crescent was a street of tall houses on the top of our hill. We lived down the hill and couldn't see the Crescent from our street. It was a place which people talked about but which we never visited. But when my parents gave me my first bicycle and I rode to the top of the hill, I saw that the Crescent was really there. The old houses stood high on the hill and there were plants and flowers everywhere, round every door and window, on every wall from the tops of the houses to the ground. It was like a river of different greens, with here and there bright reds and pinks and yellows. I thought that it was one of the most wonderful places in the world. For a long time I just stood there and looked at it in the warm afternoon sunshine. There was nobody around and the only sounds were birds singing.. "It's like the Gardens of Babylon," I thought. "I must come up here again." It was only five minutes up the hill, but I didn't go back again for three years.