This week Marion tells us about her last few years in Bedminster's Regent Street.

This week I am still in Regent Street – but not for much longer.

My little sister was born in 1936 and we moved the following year.

We lived in a terraced house which I always remember as being quite dark.

Although there was a front room, which was used on special occasions, we lived in the kitchen.

I also recall a narrow hallway where dad kept his bike.

Dad was a costermonger, so we always had fruit and veg which perhaps explains my love of both.

I think the fruit – especially the oranges and grapefruit – were quite 'pinky' (becoming overripe) by the time we ate them.

Everything he brought home was probably left over from Saturday nights and he didn't work Sundays.

Bedminster was mum's stamping ground and I loved going there with her on Saturdays. It was all so exciting, smelly and noisy, and I used to hold her hand quite tightly. There were trams, on which I was taken only occasionally, and horses and carts.

The brewer's drays (carts) were pulled by Shire horses which would snort and stamp their hoofs.

I was sent to nursery school when I was four, I think mum paid about two pence a week, and put down for a nap in the afternoons.

Mum must have gone shopping on Friday's as well, or perhaps gran did, because on that day we always had fish.

I don't know why, unless it was perhaps that my gran's side of the family were Jewish.

But on Good Friday we always had the most (in my opinion) revoltingly smelly fish in the world.

This was "tea fish" which, since it was so stiff, had to be soaked overnight in a bowl.

Mum or gran used to make parsley sauce to go with it.

Although I was young when we moved, I have vivid memories of Bedminster.

Perhaps these are a mixture of the times we lived in, Regent Street and the times we went back to Bedminster after we'd moved to Knowle West.

We always went to East Street first.

Here, at the butcher's, they used to drive the cattle into the shop to be slaughtered in the back yard.

I think it was called Babbage's, which may have later become Stan Butts.

Perhaps there were two butchers shops?

Mum used to say that every other blooming shop was a pub, so there must have been a lot.

I also recall the Bedminster Hippodrome, WD & HO Wills' and a Woolworth store.

One of my favourite places was Verrechia's ice cream parlour, which I thought was very grand, and where, if I was good, and lucky, I might get an ice cream cornet.

In later years, when he was on leave from the army, dad used to take me there sometimes for an ice cream sundae.

Dad knew everyone, it seemed, as not only had he been a costermonger, but also a very good dancer and amateur boxer.

Dad was as proud as punch of us girls – as the photo of me and my elder sister, Joan, shows.

He always used to call us his "queens" – as in "How are you, my queen?"

Bryant's was a another lovely shop which sold every kind of fish – kippers (which dad loved), cockles and mussels and whelks and also crab and lobster

Once, given a whelk to eat, I chewed it all the way home until I was allowed to spit it out.

There was also a faggot and peas shop on Redcliffe Hill, where I used to go with gran.

She would take a basin and the man would ladle the faggots and peas into it. The smell used to make my mouth water.

Sometimes we would go to Miles draper's shop in Cannon Street, where mum would buy everything from material to knitting wool.

She and gran used to knit socks and darn them when they went into holes using something that looked liked a mushroom.

We still went to Miles after our move to Knowle West.

See you next week.