Playing House

EASY STREET

http://easystreetprompts.blogspot.com/2009/06/prompt-566-playing-house.html

suggests this title.

PLAYING HOUSE

A meme has brought back a memory. The illustration too.

The memory is very old; from 1942.

I was evacuated, for the War was at its height

And, at that time, the future was looking far from bright.

I was living in a farm-house, quite an alien place to me,

For I had lived my early life right next-door to the sea.

I remember very little, but two daughters I recall;

One was rather older and one was very small.

I wonder whose idea it was to use the old pigsties

As little Wendy Houses, palaces in disguise.

The sties were clean and whitewashed; not a trace of smell remained;

And they were even watertight because it often rained.

Houses for girls to play in? No-one had one of those!

Except for Shirley Temple and the Princess Margaret Rose.

Now I'd a play-house of my own! It seemed like a dream come true,

And we played at being neighbours for at least a summer through.

We had rickety old furniture and crockery past its best,

And thrown-out pieces of this and that, tea-towels and the rest.

We 'visited' each other, gossiped over the garden wall,

Until, I can't remember why, the game began to pall.

I'd forgotten all about it until that little phrase

'Playing House' brought back a facet of my childhood days.

Another imaginary house here:

http://rinklyrimes.blogspot.com/2008/08/94-view-from-eighteen.html