The Pre-War House and Other Stories

The Pre-War House

In the front garden, in the narrow beds, the flowers which emerged in what felt like the first days of spring lie buried beneath the late snow, their opening buds like small mouths gaping in shock, their stems broken.

Inside, the rooms are full of cardboard boxes, into which the contents of the house have been packed. I open cupboards and wardrobes and drawers which I have already checked and know are empty, peering into and under the dark-wood furniture and the bare-mattressed beds, looking for the smallest thing which may have been left behind.

I remember the sounds of this house in which I grew up — the creaking of the doors and the floorboards and the stairs, the groaning of the pipes, the wheezing and sighing of the springs in the sofa cushions — the sounds of an old house aching. But mostly I remember the silence, the stillness.

Lifting the remaining pictures down from the walls, I am struck by the brightness of the squares of wallpaper behind them, the sharpness of the pattern, like pictures of the wallpaper as it used to be, framed by the wallpaper as it is now, which has faded over the years.

When the house is all packed up and everything is clean, I will sit at the kitchen table and eat the supper I brought from home, and mark a pile of essays on the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic and the ways in which the seeds of World War Two were sown in World War One. I have bedding to put on my old single bed in my old room, in which I will sleep tonight. My car is parked in the road, in front of the garden wall, by the icy kerb, to leave the driveway free for the van which will be here tomorrow.

In the morning, the men will come, and I will let them in. They will walk through this quiet house in their heavy boots, and they will take away all the boxes and the furniture, the contents of this old house, load it all up and take it away.

‘This house was brand new,’ said my grandmother, ‘when I was a child, in the 1930s, before the war. The garden was nothing but mud from one end to the other. My father laid the brick path down to the end wall, marked out the vegetable patch, and grassed the rest of it over.’

Little about the house had been changed since then. We were sitting on the same pre-war three-piece suite, with pre-war family photographs arranged on the pre-war furniture and pre-war pictures hanging on the high walls. Pre-war curtains kept the sunlight off the pre-war wallpaper and the pre-war carpets, and a pre-war clock ticked in the hallway.

‘Over the road,’ she said, ‘it was all fields. They’ve spoilt it now, building those houses there.’ She gazed out of the window at the ruined landscape. ‘We knew the war was coming, and sure enough it came. I was just a girl, a little younger than you are now. One night, a bomb fell in the field opposite.’ She nodded towards the new houses. ‘It made a big hole in the ground, but it didn’t go off. I saw it, the unexploded enemy bomb lying at the bottom, smooth and round like an egg in a nest.’

I thought about the quiet tree roots and the blind earthworms, startled in the ground or torn in two, their raw ends squirming, and my grandmother looked up at the empty sky, as if she was worried that the bombs had not yet all fallen.

I imagined it still lying there, this unhatched egg buried in a hole in the ground, under the grass with the roots and the worms, under the houses, the new estate.

My father was born in the 1950s, long after the end of the war but not before the end of rationing; even in peacetime the meanness of the war lingered. He was raised by my grandmother in this pre-war house, and it was he, in my childhood, who re-glued the wallpaper when it peeled, who mended the clock when it failed.

The front of our house, like all the other houses in the street, was painted white. Every few years, my father put on his protective overalls and spent a week up a ladder, cleaning the brickwork and the window frames, bleaching mould and treating rot and filling cracks and sanding and sealing flaking and crumbling patches. And then he painted, from left to right, from top to bottom, from corner to corner, working the new paint across each brick and between the bricks and into the corners. Our house shone in the sunshine, like the twinkling tooth in a toothpaste advert.

He liked to clean. He started in his mother’s attic bedroom and cleaned all the way down to the kitchen, cleaning the windows with vinegar and newspaper, the dark wood with lemon oil, the oven with baking soda. He was like a flood washing through the house, down the stairs and out through the back door, all the dirt pouring down the drain. When he had finished, our pre-war house looked brand new.

His garden was immaculate. His lawn was like a bowling green; it looked like he trimmed it with nail scissors. Nothing wild grew there. He dealt with the seeds shat down by birds in flight, like bombs dropped by enemy planes, and the Spanish bluebells whose bulbs lay deep in the earth beneath his pristine lawn, whose shoots wormed their way towards the surface in the spring. He protected his vegetables from the cabbage maggots which wanted to burrow into the soft roots and spoil them, and from the moth larvae which wanted to lay their eggs between the young leaves of his lettuces.

Spring was a minefield; he preferred the winter, the frost, the freeze, the ice — the clean, white world.

He was not a handsome man, but he was always clean — ‘spick and span,’ said my grandmother — and he had strong bones, good bone structure. ‘I have good bones,’ he said, ‘and good teeth. I have good genes.’

Like my father, I love the winter, the whitewash of snow, the freezing of everything. In deep snow, there is no garden, now gone to seed; there is no grass, grown long and uneven and littered with autumn’s leaves; there are no beds, no border plants strangled by weeds; there is no driveway, no pavement, no road; there is just snow, in which the only footprints are my own.

The outside world seems remote, like a landscape photograph of the bare branches of cold trees against a blank, white sky, viewed through glass which I clean the way he did, with vinegar and newspaper.

I glue the pre-war paper where it is peeling from the walls, but I don’t know how to fix the hallway clock which is running slow. I lift it down from the wall, and it keeps on ticking, pulsing in my hands.

On the whole, the only new things which came into the house came with my mother when she married my father in 1977 and in her early twenties that wasn’t very much. She brought some mugs with jokes on, which were put to the back of the crockery cupboard, behind the family china, and nonetheless got broken over the years. She brought some family photographs, and displayed them on the sideboard alongside her in-laws, and my grandmother moved them to the back, these interlopers, who peeked cheerfully, colourfully, through the gaps. She brought her books, and put them in the bookcase in the living room, and my grandmother winced to see the random and vulgar paperbacks which had appeared on her shelves, which she found nestling between her hardback classics.

Before my mother married my father, she was a hostess on long-distance coaches. It wasn’t well paid or glamorous — she didn’t like the old-fashioned uniform or serving tea on bumpy, bendy roads — and she had never been abroad, but she got to travel up and down the country, going to cities and tourist attractions and the seaside.

My father, a passenger on a weekday coach to Bournemouth, on his way to a conference, had watched her walking up and down the aisle, with her slim figure buttoned smartly into her modest uniform, her good legs in polished heels, her long, fair hair neat, pinned up on top of her head. She had served him little disposable cups of warm tea, wobbling a little when the coach went round a roundabout, holding on, and the sunshine through the window had fallen on her face, lighting her clear skin and her blue eyes, and he had smiled, showing his good teeth.

My mother’s skin was as smooth and pale as the bluebell bulbs beneath my father’s lawn, as smooth and pale as the larvae in his vegetable patch.

She shaved her legs in the bath, removing the light brown stubble which sprouted from her follicles. She peered into the bathroom mirror, worrying over her complexion, looking for clogged pores and spots gathering beneath the surface, looking for the bad skin which had plagued her as a girl, looking for wrinkles and crow’s feet, applying concealer and foundation and powder. She had her hair cut short now; she had it done every week, and came home from the hair salon smelling like she had been laundered.

Outside, it was nearly the twenty-first century, but when she stepped through her front door, she said, she could have been my great-grandmother stepping into her hallway sixty years earlier. She closed the door and found herself standing in a pre-war house which was deathly quiet apart from the ticking of that interminable clock. She disliked that house, with its wallpaper which was older than she was, older than my grandmother. She disliked the ancient kitchen with its pre-war china, whose gilt rims were faded from having been sucked at by generations of mouths. She wanted new cupboards and a freezer and a microwave and a mixer tap. She disliked the stillness of the house, and the smell, the smell of vinegar and mothballs — like pickled onions, she said, and death.

She once brought a new vase into the house, something modern she liked. She put it on the mantelpiece in the living room, and my grandmother looked at it and said it didn’t go. It stayed there for a while though, even after my mother found it broken on the hearth and had to glue it.

Early in their marriage, before I was born, my mother took for herself a small patch of the garden, near the end wall, where she planted a barberry bush. She sat out there from time to time, in her little bit of my father’s garden, just looking at the flowers on the barberry bush, or closing her eyes in the sunshine, and my father hovered at a distance, agitated, taking it out on the weeds.

I have brought tea bags and milk and sugar, but not a mug. I unpack one of the newspaper-wrapped china cups from a cardboard box marked ‘kitchen’.

There was mould growing, spores breeding on the overripe fruit in the fridge and in the fruit bowl, clinging to the softening skins; breeding in the bread bin and in the dregs of tea at the bottom of an unwashed cup.

The fridge is empty now, apart from my carton of milk. The bread bin and the fruit bowl and the cups are packed away, apart from the one I am using. The kettle is still out on the worktop.

There is an old bar of tar soap by the sink. Its heavy smell is unpleasant, sickening.

I turn on the tap, and the house trembles.

My sister, said my grandmother, was our mother’s daughter. I had seen photographs of my mother at Susan’s age, and if it hadn’t been for the look of a 1960s photograph and the 1960s fashions I might not have been able to tell them apart. They had the same slight frame, the same small features, the same colouring, the same skin. They had the same tilt of the head and the same way of looking at you out of the same pair of pale blue eyes.

There was not so much of our mother in me. I was younger than my sister but bigger, and darker.

Susan had always been our father’s favourite. His eyes followed her around rooms. He liked to make her laugh, to hear the laugh which was just like our mother’s. And he liked to watch the night sky with her — on clear nights they went up to the attic room, sat in the dark on a bench at the window, and watched the skies through an old telescope. They sat side by side, my sister, looking at the moon and its craters, looking at the planets and the stars, looking for comets and meteors, and my father, scanning the vast, black night.

She was clever, and she knew what she wanted to do when she grew up: she wanted to study tropical diseases, parasites. She told me about worms which burrow through your eyeballs, or into your skin and lay their eggs in you, or which lay their eggs in your wounds and when the larvae hatch they tunnel into your skin to feed, and if they are disturbed they screw themselves in deeper. She told me about parasites which live in your stomach, and tiny, translucent fish in the Amazon which swim up inside you when you wee in the water, which slither up and put out their spines to anchor themselves, and start nibbling. I felt them crawling under my skin and in my stomach, felt them wriggling and chewing inside me, making me squirm.

Sometimes I went up to the attic room to look through the telescope. I went on my own, without asking, and sat on the bench at the open window, squeezing one eye shut and looking through the eyepiece with the other. The images were blurred, distorted by thermals, seen through a heat haze. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at, these distant objects brought astonishingly close to my wide-open eye. I tried not to move or change anything, to stay still, just looking through the eyepiece; I tried to be careful.

But one time, perhaps a leg on the tripod was not fully out, or perhaps my foot moved, but as I sat there in the dark, with my eye pressed to the lens, trying to see the far-away craters of the moon, the telescope toppled, falling away from me, and when it hit the wooden floor there was a sound like something breaking inside. I sat in the dark with screwworms in my heart and flies hatching in my stomach.

I put the telescope up on its feet again and crept away, leaving the telescope broken in the darkness. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened; I never told anyone it was me. When the telescope was found to be damaged, my father didn’t get it mended — or perhaps he tried and found it couldn’t be fixed.

In the attic, in my grandmother’s old room, the windows are closed. I can’t hear the outside world; I can’t hear the traffic or the people going by or the neighbours’ children playing in the snow.

There is a pillow on my grandmother’s stripped-bare bed, and some half-finished knitting on her night-stand, something blue. I can smell her, on the pillow, in the air, in the dust.

The telescope is gone, but the bench is still there at the window. I sit down and look out at the bright day, at the distant sky, and the tree-tops agitated by the soundless wind. I can’t see the moon but it is there, lurking quietly in the daylight.

In the silence, I feel the squirming and fidgeting under my skin, in my belly.

My father worked in an office, inputting medical data and producing charts tracing the spread and control of disease. He liked the precision of statistics, the clean lines of his graphs, the capturing of epidemics and pandemics in two-tone bar charts. He worked beneath shelves full of files, shelves bowed beneath the weight of his archived records.

At home, too, he monitored activity, keeping all kinds of diaries, notebooks in which he wrote regularly. He liked to sit in the quiet corners of that quiet house, bent over his work, filling his notebooks with his small, tight writing.

He had one for the garden, in which he made notes about the various weeds and pests he endeavoured to control, about the Spanish bluebell which ruined his lawn (‘naturally more invasive,’ he noted, ‘than the English bluebell; when cross-pollination takes place, the resulting seed is genetically corrupt’), the blackspot which attacked his roses (‘fungal infestation of the leaves, spreading to the stems and buds; no cure for the infected parts — remove and destroy’), the vine weevil which spoiled the leaves on his strawberries (‘adult vine weevils are female and lay hundreds of eggs in the summer; eggs are brown and diameter is less than 1mm — very difficult to find in the soil’), and the sap-sucking aphid (‘overwintering eggs are laid in crevices, and hatch in the spring’).

He had one in which he documented the things he had seen through his father’s telescope, looking through the attic window with my sister. While Susan was looking at the moon and the stars, looking for comets and meteors, my father was looking for UFOs, looking for flying saucers and aliens, recording anomalies in his notebook, his diary of evidence.

He had a notebook in which he monitored the activities of neighbours who encroached on his territory, whose ivy grew up the walls of his house, clamping sticky feet to his fresh paintwork and climbing up to and under his eaves; whose trees bent over the fence and dropped windfall apples on his path; whose hedges grew too high and blocked the light; whose cats crept into his vegetable patch and left their mess behind, and dug at the soil around his border plants and around the barberry bush; whose children kicked their balls onto his lawn and then came over the fence and through the hedge to fetch them back, and who put eggs through his letterbox so that they broke on his doormat, the viscous innards seeping between the fibres.

And he had one, said my mother, in which he wrote stories. He had never told her this — he kept his jottings to himself — but she had looked, and there, in one of my father’s notebooks, she found stories, and in all of my father’s stories, she found herself — a character who looked just the way she did, dressed the way she did, spoke the way she did; a character whose blonde hair had darkened, whose grey was coming through; a character who was wearing my mother’s blue jumper and the skirt with a tear which she never got round to mending; a character who was saying something my mother had said over breakfast, something banal about the eggs. My mother was furious to find herself there, to find this woman wearing her clothes and copying the things she said and her mannerisms. And in some of the stories, this woman had a daughter who was small and fair and clever, and who adored her father.

I have never kept a diary. I remember what has happened and who did what.

There are too many quiet corners in this quiet house for me. I work with the radio on, switching between stations and turning up the volume, opening windows and chasing the silence out of the emptying rooms.

In the bathroom, there is mildew in the grout between the shower tiles, and there are spiders making webs behind the toilet. I put vinegar on the mildew, but leave the spiders alone.

In some ways, I am my father’s daughter, and in some ways I am not.

My mother had a friend who had a motorbike. He came by in the middle of the day, when my father was at work. You could hear the bike coming down the road, slowing outside our house, and turning in. It was noisy and smelly and the oil tank leaked.

He parked his bike in our driveway, where our father’s car belonged. He took off his helmet and ran his black-leather-gloved hand through his oil-black hair. He walked, with his long-legged stride and his heavy-booted step, up to our house, to our back door, and my mother let him in.

We took our shoes off in the house, but my mother’s friend didn’t; he walked his dirty boots across my father’s scrubbed-clean floor, and sat down at the table. My sister and I, drawn to the kitchen by the sound of the motorbike, hung around, watching him. My mother made coffee, and Susan and I were allowed to stay and have some. When my sister spooned sugar into her cup, our mother’s friend said, ‘You don’t need sugar, you’re sweet enough already,’ and my sister giggled. She thought he was good-looking, although, she said, his eyes were weird, and his eyebrows met in the middle. And then he said the same thing to my mother — ‘You don’t need sugar,’ he said, ‘you’re sweet enough already’ — and she laughed too. I didn’t like the taste of coffee, I just pretended to drink it so that I could stay, and I didn’t take any sugar, and he didn’t say it to me.

After a while, when my sister had finished her coffee and I had barely touched mine — just putting my lips to the rim of the cup, taking just enough to put a nasty taste in my mouth — our mother sent us outside to play. I followed Susan to the driveway, where she sat on the motorbike, first on her own and pretending to ride it, pretending to be him, and then behind me, with her arms around me, pretending to be his pillion passenger, pretending to be his girlfriend.

I liked riding the bike with my sister, but I didn’t like him. I didn’t like him coming to our house when my father was out. I didn’t like his filthy bike standing in our driveway. I didn’t like him sitting in our kitchen, making our mother laugh.

We watched them through the vinegar-clean kitchen window. We saw his hand, olive-skinned and oil-stained, touching our mother’s leg underneath the table, and stroking her cheek as he stood to go.

He left dark stains on the driveway, and on our mother’s pink face, and on her white jeans. She stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing washing-up liquid into the dirty mark on her thigh.

We didn’t know his name, or what he was to our mother, but we knew she’d met him a long time ago, before we were born, before she met our father. And we knew not to tell our father that he visited.

Our mother washed her face and her trousers, and our father tried to clean up the puddle of oil he found on the driveway, but it wouldn’t quite go. He stood over it, troubled by the residue, the remaining stain.

I hear a motorbike. It’s a sound which even now makes me go to the window. I half expect my sister to come running, to see the bike parked in the driveway, to sit on its still-warm seat. I feel her arms around me, holding on.

These motorbikes race by. When I look, it has already gone.

I sit at the kitchen table, sucking at the faded gilt rim of the china cup, drinking sugary tea — I am not yet sweet enough.

We ate in the kitchen, all together at a little Formica-topped table. I sat between my mother, with her perfect complexion and her clean, white jeans and her laundry smell, and my father, who ate slowly and carefully, leaving the skins of anything which had grown in the ground, next to the dirt and the worms. My sister sat next to our grandmother, whose jaw clicked when she ate. It was cramped around that small table, and all our elbows knocked together if we stuck them out too far.

When nobody said anything, we could just hear ourselves eating, our cutlery against our plates, and my grandmother’s jaw clicking. Sometimes my mother looked like she was going to speak, but then just raised her eyebrows instead. Sometimes my father said something like, ‘A very nice piece of meat, Barbara.’ And sometimes my grandmother said something like, ‘Barbara’s friend was here again today.’

My mother’s knife squealed against her china plate.

‘Barbara’s friend?’ said my father.

‘Her friend with the motorbike,’ said my grandmother.

My sister and I looked at one another, our cutlery frozen in midair, the click of our grandmother’s jaw counting out the seconds like a metronome.

My father continued eating for a moment, picking away at the inside of his jacket potato, leaving its dirty skin. And then he put down his cutlery and looked at my mother, on whose clean, pink cheek I could almost see that black, oily fingerprint. He put his knife and fork together on his plate, stood up, pushed his chair under the table, and left the room.

We sat there for a while, the four of us. Only my grandmother was still eating. My mother sat opposite her, with her elbows on the table and her hands clasped together like somebody praying — Dear God and In the name of Jesus Christ — with her eyebrows raised at my grandmother, who was concentrating on her dinner, finishing off the nice piece of meat.

My mother pushed her chair back and left the kitchen. Following our father into the living room, she found him writing in one of his notebooks. Their voices carried through that quiet house, into the echoey kitchen. He said, ‘I thought we agreed… ’ and, ‘You did promise me, Barbara… ’ And she told him what she thought about his weird little stories, which, yes, she had read; she told him what she thought about his weird little notebook wife and his weird little notebook daughter who lived in his weird little notebook world; and my father gathered up his violated notebooks, his spoiled stories, and went upstairs.

Our mother returned to the kitchen and cleared our father’s place, scraping the scraps he had left into the bin, while we ate the cold remains of our dinner.

In the kitchen, sitting alone at the table, finishing my tea, I think I hear that metronomic clicking of my grandmother’s jaw, but it is just the clock ticking in a box in the hallway.

That year, my sister suddenly grew in all directions. She grew tall, taller than me and nearly as tall as our father. Breasts swelled beneath her T-shirt; blocked pores swelled beneath her skin. She was blossoming, said our mother. Our father looked at her disapprovingly, as if she were something overgrown in his carefully tended garden, a corner found going wild; as if she were something overripe in his vegetable plot, with a distasteful maturing pungency which got right up his nose.

She became mouthy and surly, arguing with him and not laughing at his jokes. She skipped meals and slammed doors, played loud music and smelt of cigarettes. She went out with boys, or brought them home. Our father would have said no, no boys, but our mother said of course there would be boys; his little girl was growing up, she said, and there would be boys.

There was no star-gazing now, through a broken telescope. My father viewed her from a distance, narrowing his eyes as if she were something unknown. He would have liked to glue her like the coming-away wallpaper, to fix her like the mind-of-its-own clock.

I don’t know which was worse for him, to think that she was out there, after dark, with these boys — these boys whose bodies were pulsing with adolescent hormones, testosterone stimulating their glands, their skin erupting, their voices breaking, deepening; these boys with one-track minds and wandering hands — or to know that these boys were in his house, their enormous shoes in his hallway.

Susan and I shared a bedroom. When she had friends round, I sat in the living room with my father and my grandmother, doing homework or reading in dimming light or beneath the fringed and floral standard lamp, listening to the clicking of my grandmother’s knitting needles, and, through the ceiling, the bass beat, the heartbeat thump, of Susan’s music, and the deeper tones of a boy’s voice. My mother did not sit with us. She moved about the house, singing to herself, or she went out. My father sat in his armchair, waiting for bedtime, trying not to think about the boys and their hormones and their wandering hands, waiting for his wife to come home.

My mother often came home smelling of smoke. It clung to her coat and her clothes; it clung to her hair and her night-air-flushed skin and her breath. It followed her in through the kitchen door and crept through the house.

I stand on the doorstep, letting in some fresh air. It is icy out. I can see my breath, like when we used to hold imaginary cigarettes between our fingers and pretend we were puffing out smoke, when we were little, when it was cold.

I don’t smoke, but sometimes I like the smell of it, the smell of my sister’s skin, the smell of my mother coming home.

Spring spoiled my father’s garden with beautiful weeds. The Spanish bluebells erupted from the earth, worming up into the light, a bank of them invading and desecrating his flawless lawn. Even as my mother admired them, my father pulled them up, though the fecund bulbs remained, deep down in the soil.

Where the bluebells had been, there were holes and bare patches, and my father cut the grass brutally short, punishing his ravaged lawn.

In his vegetable patch, he found his neat rows of seedlings turned over and broken beneath the weight of cat shit, turds planted and raked over as if they might bloom come summer. He found cabbage maggot pupae in the soil around his leaf vegetables, and moth larvae eggs between the leaves of his good lettuces, and he crushed them between his fingers to stop them hatching.

He found oily fingerprints on the wallpaper, and tiny woodworm holes in the skirting boards, small piles of frass beneath them, and in one corner of the kitchen he found the little black droppings of a rodent. In the cupboard, there was a cereal packet with a hole in the side, cornflakes spilling out. He put these things in the bin: the insect shit and the rodent shit and the spoiled cereal packet at which sharp little teeth had gnawed, the tiny evidence of intrusion and contamination. The oily fingerprints remained, ingrained.

He set a trap, an old-fashioned mouse-trap with a sprung metal jaw. At night, I heard the little scrabbling sounds of something ferreting about in the kitchen, and silence, such tiny silences, and I stiffened, imagining the baited jaw, waiting for the snap of the trap, the damage.

In the morning, my father stood in the middle of the kitchen, beneath the strip light, holding the mouse, which he had found caught in his trap, lying bloody and broken and struggling on his kitchen floor, its smooth, pink tail writhing like a worm.

My grandmother sat at the table, eating her breakfast and eyeing the mouse. ‘That won’t be it,’ she said. ‘That won’t be all. There’ll be a nest somewhere.’ Once again, the trap was set, the sprung metal jaw baited, tense, and once again, I held my breath.

My father took the mouse out to the dustbin, and stood there for a minute, with the chill of early spring, the chill of the outside world, on his skin and in his lungs and beneath his slippered feet, its brightness in his eyes. There was fresh oil on the driveway, new dark puddles next to the stains he had tried to scrub away.

It is February now, and there are no doubt grubs in my father’s vegetable plot; the insects have no doubt been making themselves at home, the females laying their eggs in his soil, the maggots hatching and burrowing down and eating through the roots of the cabbages he planted in the autumn, the pupae overwintering underground, waiting to emerge as flies in the spring.

One weekend in the middle of the summer, the motorbike appeared in our driveway again. It was a Saturday and my father was at home. He was in the back garden, mowing stripes into the lawn. I was at the front of the house, sitting on the well-scrubbed doorstep, swatting at the flies and looking at my mother’s friend sitting on his motorbike, the engine running.

The front door opened. I fell inwards a little, and my mother came out. She had to step over me, her heeled sandals and her bare legs clearing me, her hand lightly touching my head, the hem of her skirt and her perfume breezing by. She cut across the corner of the front garden, her heels sinking into the grass, making holes in the lawn, and clicking down the driveway to the motorbike. She climbed up behind her friend and was whisked away, riding pillion without a helmet, her bare knees gripping his hips, the flimsy fabric of her skirt catching the wind they made, as my father appeared at the side of the house, holding nettles in his gloved hands.

We watched them go, and even when they were long gone, it seemed as if the black fumes still hung in the air, and the sound of the engine still throbbed in our ears, and the sensation of her passing fingertips still lingered in my hair, at the roots.

My grandmother made dinner, a salad with cold cuts. We ate with the door and the windows open, until the kitchen filled with flies, and then with the door and the windows closed, despite the heat, the closeness, and the flies which were already in.

My mother came home in the small hours. The motorbike lingered in our driveway, disturbing us, polluting the clear, night air. When her friend rode away, my mother came in, through the kitchen door — I heard the squeal of her key turning in the lock, the creak of the stairs, the throb of the water pipes, the complaining of the ageing house woken in the middle of the night. I heard my father’s voice, my mother’s name (‘Barbara,’ he said, ‘Barbara, Barbara…’). And then there was silence, and I held my breath.

My mother’s friend appeared every few weeks after that, and took her away for the day and sometimes overnight, and it seems to me we spent that whole summer just waiting for his motorbike to appear, just waiting for her to leave.

In the winter, ice forms inside the pipes and sometimes they burst.

There is a programme on the radio about the history of quarantine, about ships anchored and isolated to prevent the spread of the plague — forty days and forty nights of confinement, floating, away from the world, just waiting. Or cholera, and I imagine the waiting, with a parasite deep in the intestines, with an eye on the bowels, the waiting and watching.

My father stood at the kitchen sink, frowning at the summer’s flies which lay dying or dead on the windowsill, frowning at the things on the draining board which had been washed up but were not clean — one of the good teacups with the rose-pink stain of my mother’s lipstick on the rim, and a dirty tumbler which he held up to the light, peering at the greasy fingerprints on the glass.

The lawn was littered with fallen leaves, our gutters clogged with decomposing debris. That year, the snow came early, and any leaves which hadn’t been raked up lay beneath it, freezing.

My mother left, with her belongings, everything she wanted, in one small suitcase. She took her modern vase, and she left us; she left her barberry bush, and her footprints in the snow on the driveway, walking away. Where her footsteps stopped, there was a motorbike track, and oil in the snow.

My father cut down the barberry bush, cut it right down to the ground.

If we went out, walking briskly, he eyed the frontages of the neighbours’ houses, the paintwork as dingy as decaying teeth, net curtains yellowing like jaundiced eyes, weeds flourishing in the overgrown lawns and sprouting through the cracks in the paths. He eyed the dog mess burning holes in the snow on the pavement, and the greying slush in the gutters, the street soiled beneath his feet, defaced.

When the gossiping neighbours saw us they snapped shut their mouths, cutting off the ends of their sentences, the unspoken scraps squirming on their tongues like halved earthworms in the dirt.

My father came home and shut the front door with one shoulder against it, and locked it, as if the outside world were a cupboard full of so much crap.

He ignored the phone when it rang. He stood in the hallway looking at it, and didn’t pick it up. Perhaps he thought it might be my mother, asking to come home. Perhaps he was afraid that it was not.

I tried to find some trace of her, but I found none, not even a cheap romance in my grandmother’s bookcase, or a mug with a joke on it at the back of the kitchen cupboard; not even the colour of her mouth on the side of an old teacup, or the smell of her in the drawers where her clothes had been or in the bathroom cabinet where she had kept her toiletries.

My grandmother made supper, and we all ate together at the little kitchen table, while fresh snow settled, and the pre-war clock ticked in the hallway.

I step out of the back door and walk down to the end of the garden, leaving my footprints in the snow on the lawn, treading carefully on the icy path.

There is a spent firework and evidence of cats in the vegetable patch. The barberry bush has grown back; it is almost up to my shoulders. There is something here of my mother’s after all, something she left behind, something she may or may not have wanted.

‘Not long now,’ says the next door neighbour, who has followed me down to the end of the garden on his side, and is leaning on the fence.

‘No,’ I say, ‘not long now.’ I want him to go away, but he stays where he is, looking at me.

‘Sorry to hear about your father passing away.’ Passing away, he says, the euphemism as light and clean as falling snow.

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘My wife and I used to call on him,’ he says. ‘We were sure he was in, but he never answered the door. He used to keep his curtains closed, during the day.’

The insinuation hangs between us. He stands there, with his arms dangling over the fence like the branches of his apple tree, dropping unwanted fruit into my father’s garden where it rots, attracting wasps.

‘He never got over it, did he?’ he says. ‘He was never quite right after that.’

I turn away. Beneath the barberry bush, in the lee of the wall, the ground is bare, snowless, and stray flowers have taken root in the cold earth. They have a strong smell, these wild plants, and even when I walk away, back up to the house, the scent follows me.

When the snow melted, autumn’s dead and unraked leaves were still there underneath, rotting on the lawn, and the oil stains remained on the driveway.

My father raked up the stray leaves. I watched him from the house, pulling his rake across his thawing lawn, and standing, staring at the grass beneath his feet, as if it were not just grass, as if this were not his perfect lawn, as if it were something strange. I watched him go down to his shed and return with a spade. Its clean metal caught the cold sunlight, its glint dazzling me. In the chill of that pre-spring day, he touched the sharp edge of his spade to his perfect lawn, raised his foot and stamped on the tread, driving the head into the ground. He lifted metres of turf, turned over tons of earth, digging out the bluebell bulbs one by one. It took him days. He turned the lawn into mud; it must have been almost as it was when my great-grandfather first stood there, wondering where to begin. At night, the garden was a strange barren moonscape. The discarded bulbs lay in buckets, their roots drying, their shoots wilting.

When he was done, when he was certain that every last bulb was out, that nothing remained, he levelled the earth and replaced the turf and made his lawn immaculate again. He stood back, resting his spade and his aching body, the light going, his sweat turning cold.

But he left alone that part of the garden which my mother once took for herself; he didn’t go digging there, removing the turf and turning over the earth beneath the end wall. That shady patch he just kept as neat as he could, keeping the grass clipped short and that resilient barberry bush cut down to the ground.

In the spring, cabbage maggots hatched from their overwintering cocoons and laid eggs in my father’s vegetable patch, and he pored through the soil, hunting out these nests and crushing the small, white eggs. Slug eggs laid in the autumn hatched, and he found holes in the leaves of new plants, seedlings ruined. He buried beer traps in the ground, jars in which to drown the slugs which ate their way through his garden at night. I stood nearby, watching, and he turned to me and said, ‘We used to drown kittens, the unwanted litters of cats on heat.’

Bluebells still come up, every spring. They are not yet out this year, but the bulbs are down there, deep in the earth, their green shoots aching for the daylight.

And there are eggs, buried in the soil, waiting for warmer weather, when they will hatch.

My grandmother sat in her armchair keeping her hands busy with knitting, keeping her tongue busy with boiled sweets. When she wasn’t knitting, her hands trembled, and when she wasn’t sucking on sweets, her tongue loosened.

She always gave up sweets for the forty days of Lent. It made her feel good, she said; it made her feel clean.

‘Your father too,’ she said. ‘He won’t have sweets now until Easter.’ We were sitting in the living room and she had her knitting basket out. She was unpicking an old blue jumper for the wool. Taking her little scissors to where it had been bound off, and cutting through, she said, ‘Your mother, on the other hand, she just ate whatever she liked; she never gave up anything.’ She pulled at the neat rows of stitching, pulling the wool loose. ‘Always did just as she pleased,’ she said. ‘And what your father gave up for her. When your father met your mother, he was engaged to a lovely girl.’

While she talked, I gathered up the unravelling wool, balling it, trying to keep it neat. My grandmother unpicked a white button at the neck, and I realised that this was my mother’s blue jumper, losing its shape and coming apart in her hands.

‘There,’ she said, ‘all done,’ and we sat there holding my mother’s jumper, which was just a ball of second-hand wool in my hands, and a loose button placed in a box in my grandmother’s knitting basket, beside her sharp little scissors.

It is the first day of Lent today. I don’t know what I would give up. I have never drunk much, though sometimes I still find the reek in my nostrils. I don’t smoke, though as I say, sometimes I do like the smell — but I have seen the pictures of lungs coated with tar, stained black, suffocating; I have seen the yellowing skin.

I could give up the sugar I take in my tea, but I won’t. I drop a sugar cube into the cup, into the hot tea, and stir it until it dissolves.

‘Stop looking at me,’ said Susan.

‘I wasn’t looking at you,’ I said, ‘I was looking out of the window.’

We were in our bedroom, lying on our beds. Susan’s bed was right underneath the window, and mine was opposite. I had been looking out of the window, at Sunday’s steady rainfall, but I had also been looking at her. Not having a picture of our mother — the few there had been having gone — I sometimes tried to catch a glimpse of her by looking at my sister.

‘Stop it,’ she said, wafting her hand, as if she could feel my eyes crawling over her face. She turned onto her side, away from me, and as she turned I saw a red mark, a bruise on her neck, blood vessels burst beneath her skin, a love-bite. And then, with her face to the wall, she said, ‘Your eyes are weird.’

The rain hammered down outside.

She wanted her own bedroom; she said so all the time, even though there was no spare room, and even though I always left when she wanted the room to herself, and sat downstairs while her friends sat on my bed and touched and used my things. When they left, when I returned to my room, I found my bedding crumpled, and the shape of someone’s bottom or evidence of feet on my pillow; I found brown curls of tobacco on the covers of my books, and the corners of pages, neat little rectangles, torn out, and the air smelt like my father’s bonfires, his piles of burning leaves.

I run the vacuum cleaner into my father’s bedroom, sucking dust from the spaces between the bare floorboards.

I hoover through into our old bedroom, pushing the nose of the vacuum cleaner underneath my sister’s bed, and it strains into the empty corners like a bloodhound on a leash, recognising a scent which is scarcely there. Her bare mattress sags in the middle, the broken springs forming a hollow which remembers the shape of her, the weight of her.

There was blood on my pyjama bottoms, on the yellow cotton bed sheet, on the mattress underneath.

My grandmother told me not to wash my hair or have a bath for a week. I was unclean, like an Old Testament woman who was not allowed to touch food because she would contaminate it, the bread and butter and fruit she touched spoiling, the meat rotting and the wine turning to vinegar.

I was a young woman now, she said, and must be careful. She said this to my sister too, ‘You have to be careful.’

I studied my face in the mirror, looking for my mother but not finding her, looking for my father, but my bones were not his. I peered, looking for eyebrows which met in the middle, looking at my weird eyes staring back.

I ate more, eating between meals, a habit of which my father disapproved; it showed a lack of discipline. He found me in the kitchen, and looked at me as if I were a pest he had found in his cupboards, getting at his food.

I clean the kitchen floor, scrubbing at the tiles which are not really dirty, scrubbing away footprints which aren’t there.

I pour my bucket of water down the drain by the back door, empty the vacuum cleaner’s dust bag, and take the rubbish out down the side of the house to the dustbin at the front.

I wash my hands with the foul tar soap and put the kettle on. In the bare kitchen, I sit down at the small table and eat my sandwiches, and the bread and butter and tomatoes do not spoil at my touch and the meat does not rot, and the water comes to a furious boil in the corner.

Most of the time, my father was out, at work or in the garden; or he was busy in some quiet part of the house, cleaning or writing in his notebooks; or he was sleeping.

Sometimes he slept during the day when he was supposed to be at work. And sometimes he stayed awake at night — I heard him downstairs, in the kitchen, looking for mice, or saw him standing in the garden, down by the end wall, in the moonlight.

Either way, we hardly saw him, apart from at mealtimes, when he looked at my sister and me the same way he looked at his vegetable patch in the spring, as if there might be something unpleasant in there, some unwanted interloper; the same way he looked at the skins of the vegetables on his plate, as if they were unclean.

‘You,’ he said, over dinner, ‘do not have good bones.’ It was not clear whether he meant me or Susan or both of us. We all kept eating. ‘You,’ he continued, pointing his knife at my sister, ‘are all Barbara. You,’ he said, pivoting the knife slowly like a sniper’s rifle, turning the blade towards me, ‘I don’t know.’

I read his notebooks, and saw what he had done to my mother. He had removed the darker shades and the grey from her hair; he had grown her blond hair long again, pinning it neatly on top of her head. He had stitched up the tear in her skirt. And he had removed her child. He had made her as she used to be; he had made her young and smart and childless, and still in love with him.

He discarded things which belonged to my sister and me, as if we were no longer there. Our belongings went missing and turned up in the dustbin. We found our wardrobes empty, the hangers bare, our clothes put out on the front step for charity, waiting to be taken away. We brought these things inside again, put them back where they belonged, and if my father looked he would find them still there, returning and returning like the endlessly blooming bluebells and the endlessly breeding insects.

Sitting at the kitchen table marking essays, one-thousand-word assignments summarising the conclusion of one war and the beginnings of the next, I watch the stretched-tight skin of my distended belly pulsating, the baby moving inside me. The rhythmic kicks, or maybe hiccups, feel and look like an enormous heart beating in my stomach. Now and again, something comes to the surface, the shape of an elbow or a knee beneath my skin, pushing up inside me.

I remember the nausea, like seasickness, the barely-there watery vomit spat into the toilet bowl, my bare knees on the cold linoleum.

I have heard a heartbeat, beating fast like a bird or a mouse.

‘No,’ I said.

Susan stood in the bedroom doorway. There was a boy behind her, on the landing. ‘Go on,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m busy. And I was here first.’ I was reading, something for school. I could have read downstairs, and there was nobody down there — our father was out and our grandmother was quiet, probably napping, in her attic room — but I didn’t like the boy my sister was with. I had met him in the kitchen once — he came in through the back door, bringing with him a cloying smell of weed. I didn’t like his lingering, clinging look, his long fingers stroking the roll-up he was making, bits of tobacco dropping onto the kitchen floor.

‘All right then,’ she said, and went back out onto the landing, pulling the door to behind her. I listened for the sound of their footsteps on the stairs, my sister and this boy going down to the kitchen or the living room, but instead I heard the sound of my father’s bedroom door opening, and closing.

I sat on my bed, staring at my book, reading the same page over and over again to the heartbeat thump of the headboard against the wall.

After about an hour, they came out and went downstairs. They had picked up their clothes and their cigarettes; they had made the bed. They had left the room just as it was, except perhaps for the stray brown curls on the bedding, and that pervading smell of smoke.

It is late now. I open the back door for some night air before locking up. There is a full moon, hanging heavy and milky in the dark sky. It lights the snow on the lawn and the ice on the path and the high, white walls of this pre-war house.

In the snow I see my footprints, and a bluebell, the tips of its strong, green leaves just poking through, emerging into the cold night. I imagine my father standing over his lawn, amazed to see them still coming through after all that.

I’m blooming, apparently. You’re blooming, they say, as if I am a seasonal shrub.

I swear I can smell the barberry bush and the wild flowers, the weeds, all the way from the end of the garden.

From time to time, my father found my sister loitering in the town centre with her friends, with boys, during the day, during the week, when she should have been at school or coming home. What was she doing, he wanted to know, hanging about in the street like a stray cat, with all these randy toms sniffing around her. Well what was he doing there, she said, spying on her, bothering her, when he should have been at work. And what’s more he stank, she said, he reeked.

He tried to keep her in the house in the evenings, but he couldn’t make her stay; she kept slipping away.

He smelt the smoke on her breath and in our bedroom. He found dog-ends in her pockets. Well, what was he doing looking, she asked; what was he doing going through her pockets; what was he doing in her bedroom? What had she been doing, he replied, in his bedroom? She smoked in the house and in the street, and she looked, said our father, like a slut.

They sat across the kitchen table from one another, my father and my sister. Every morning over breakfast and every evening over dinner, my father sat opposite my sister and saw my mother glaring at him through my sister’s cold blue eyes. He saw Barbara twenty years younger, before us, before him; he saw Barbara with her good figure and the bad skin of her adolescence; he saw Barbara in her youth, stinking of smoke and going with boys and telling him to go to hell.

He washed out her filthy mouth with tar soap, with his hand squeezing the back of her neck, holding her hard, pushing her head forward over the sink. The smell of that tar soap was like tasting it, that thick, burnt smell in my nostrils, in my throat, in my stomach. And when he let her go, or when she struggled free, there were red marks where he had held her, the imprints of his fingers on her skin.

Sometimes, when I try to picture my sister, when I try to see her face, all I can see is those cold, blue eyes. And sometimes I don’t see her face at all — I see her lying on her side, turned to the wall, the blood vessels in her neck broken.

My father cleaned his car as fastidiously as he cleaned the house. His car was gunmetal grey, with immaculate bodywork which he washed every week in the driveway, chasing away the warm, dirty suds with cold, clean water, chasing them over the roof and the bonnet and down the sides of the car, down the driveway, over the pavement, into the gutter and down the drain. He cleaned the inside of the car, polishing the dashboard and the windscreen and the mirrors, and hoovering the carpeting and the upholstery, pushing the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner into the corners and crannies and sucking out the dirt, and taking out the odd empty bottle which rolled about under his seat, on the floor of his clean car, and putting it in the dustbin.

There was often a bottle or two under the sink, with the cleaning products, behind the bleach.

There were bottles in the garden shed. We were not allowed to go in my father’s shed, but I did. Inside, his garden tools hung spick and span from nails on the walls; he always cleaned his tools after using them, and then hung the right tool back up on the right nail. There were magazines, in a neat pile on a high shelf. There was a bicycle, my mother’s old bicycle, dirty and rusting, its tyres deflated, under an old sheet. And there were bottles, half-full or empty, up on the shelf next to the magazines.

There were bottles in his bedroom, under his bed and on his windowsill, behind the curtain. They rattled when my father moved about at night, trembling on the floorboards and against the cold window.

My father’s breath over the breakfast table smelt bad, like something dead or dying. It seeped from his skin, that death or dying; it seeped from his pores and from the rims of his discoloured eyes.

I can see the garden shed from the window of my old bedroom. Even the shed is empty now, everything has been packed up or thrown away. There is ivy, though, growing through the roof, pushing its way beneath the roofing felt and between the planks, pushing through the webs the spiders have made.

I lay a clean double sheet over the mattress of my old single bed. I haven’t brought a pillow so I use the one I found in my grandmother’s room. Lying down, breathing in, trying to smell a laundry smell, I smell my grandmother, vinegar and dust.

There are no curtains at the window. I turn on my side and close my eyes. When I open them again, I am aching with hunger, and the moon is a huge, bright hole in the vast, black night, in the sky full of stars and comets and meteors, and the aliens my father always thought were coming.

I drifted through the long summer, through the unbroken stretch of eventless days. There was no school until September, no holiday by the sea. There was no rain for weeks on end, and the dry grass turned yellow in the parched garden. I slept badly at night; it was close.

There were men resurfacing the road in front of our house. For weeks the screaming noise of their machinery and their shouting over the noise and the thick smell of hot tarmac filled the still air. They moved slowly up the road in their heavy boots, with their heavy machines, and the road they left behind them was immaculate.

One morning, when my sister was not at home and my father was out at work, I went to his shed. I touched the tools hanging from nails on the walls, leaving prints on the cleaned and polished metal. I looked at his magazines, at the naked women with their legs wide open. I unscrewed the tops of the half-full and empty bottles and smelt the poisonous fumes which escaped from their necks. The sun beat through the little plastic window into the airless shed, and I felt grubby, my pores full of heat and filth.

I took the sheet off the bicycle and wheeled it out onto the path. It was a sad thing, a sit-up-and-beg bike with a little bell. I cleaned its dirty frame and inflated its flat tyres and oiled its rusty chain. And then I put it back in the shed, under the sheet.

Susan was often out of the house, with her friends. Mostly she came home for the dinners our grandmother made, but sometimes she stayed out all night while my father waited for her downstairs.

And sometimes, Susan stayed home all day with me. We sunbathed on the lawn like two hot cats. We lay on our backs, with the grass and the daisies pressing into our bare skin, and the hot sun pushing down on the lids of our closed eyes.

‘Nosema ocularum,’ she said. ‘Lives underground, in the earth, and in hot weather it tunnels up to the surface and jumps in your ear and wriggles into your brain and eats its way out through your eyeballs.’ She poked a blade of grass into my earhole and tickled the little hairs, making me shudder.

‘Wohlfahrtia magnifica,’ she said. ‘Lives in your underwear drawer, in your gussets, and when you pull up your pants it crawls up your bumhole and you fart yourself to death.’

I stand up, and feel the bulging pressure in my abdomen, the weight of the nesting baby and the tensing of my body readying itself. I go to the bathroom, and then lie awake in the small hours listening to the tired pulsing of the old pipes.

I once flew over Russia, and through the window I thought I saw an endless cloudscape far below, its white streaked with grey, and then realised that it was land, the bleak sprawl of Siberia.

Sometimes, now, I have trouble sleeping.

Cerebrum vermiculus. Lives in your brain, and crawls through your eyes, and eats its way through your heart.

We were sitting on the front wall, baking in the midday sun. We had been there all morning with nothing else to do. The bricks were hot under the palms of my hands and through the seat of my shorts and against my bare heels, which I bounced against the wall, marking time. It was the longest day.

Susan lit a cigarette, and I imagined the tarry heat filling her mouth, her throat, her lungs. She had another love-bite on her neck, a bruise blooming under her skin.

I said, ‘I found Mum’s old bike in the shed.’

Susan said nothing, glanced down at the cigarette burning between her fingers.

‘I fixed it up.’

She shrugged. She turned and looked down the road, gazing into the empty day, into the heat haze which hovered over the road, buckling the clean lines, shimmering like a desert horizon in a film just before a mirage appears. She sucked at her cigarette, her cheeks hollowing.

I hopped off the wall and went down by the side of the house into the back garden, over the bone-dry lawn and down the hot brick path to the airless shed, and fetched out my mother’s old bicycle. I wheeled it up to the front of the house and stood it on its stand, the soles of my bare feet cooking on the oily driveway.

‘Let’s go for a ride,’ I said. ‘I’ll pedal.’

Susan looked at the bicycle. I rang the bell and she smiled. She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall, flicked the dog-end into the flower bed behind her, and dropped her feet down onto the pavement. ‘Okay,’ she said.

I held the handlebars and straddled the bike, and she climbed on behind me and held on. I could feel her weight, and wobbled at first, unbalanced. We weaved out of the driveway, the handlebars scraping against the front wall. We bumped down the kerb and onto the melting road. We rode up and down, getting steadier and faster, up and down and turning at each end of the street, arcing through the shimmering horizon, like we were the mirage in the desert, Susan’s summer dress catching the wind we made, baring her pale legs.

I saw our father’s car turning into the street, the sun’s dazzling glint on its clean bodywork. We were cycling towards the house, unsteadily but still fast enough to make wind, and he was driving towards us, into the sun, which was beating through his shiny windscreen, beating into his red-rimmed eyes, and empty bottles were clinking, rolling around, on the vacuum-cleaned floor of his car.

For a moment, there was nothing, just the slow, hot day, and the almost empty road, and the sun touching the gleaming bonnet of my father’s car and bouncing off, and then there was a dreadful sound, like something snapping, and the heavy, burnt smell of tar.

Standing slowly, standing in the middle of the road, in the middle of that endless day, in the middle of that sprawling summer, I saw my sister, lying on her side on the pavement, on the slabs, the swell of blood beneath her skin, her cold, blue eyes turned to the wall.

My father, out of the car, stood back, his sweat turning cold. The stink of burnt rubber hung in the air. The dark streaks of his tyres stained the brand-new road.

I touch the scars on the insides of my arms and on my legs, where the tarmac took the skin off, where scabs formed and then peeled away, brown and brittle like dead leaves in the autumn.

At night, I still find myself frozen in that long moment, that timeless limbo. I still hear that silence, such a silence, and then the snap, the damage.

I wash my face in the bathroom sink, splashing cold water against my tired skin.

Every last thing is now packed in the boxes, which are marked up and sealed and ready to go. The cupboards and wardrobes and drawers are empty. The walls are bare. The fridge is switched off, the door ajar. Nothing has been left behind under the dark-wood furniture or the bare-mattressed beds. Everything is clean.

The things I brought with me are out in my car, ready to go home.

It is early. Peter won’t be up yet. He will be in our bed, and our bed will be warm, even though it is cold outside.

There is knocking at the front door, knocking and ringing and voices. From the top of the stairs I can see a figure on the doorstep, the shape fractured by the glass, a head pressing close, hands cupped around the eyes, trying to see through into the naked hallway. The men are here.

While they empty the house, I take one last walk through the garden, down to the end wall, to the barberry bush.

I have put in my bag the half-finished knitting I found on my grandmother’s night-stand, the beginnings of a very small jumper made out of the blue wool she unravelled that day in Lent, which I wound into a small, tight ball while she talked.

‘When your father met your mother,’ she said, ‘he was engaged to a lovely girl.’

My mother, at that time, was also spoken for; she had a boyfriend, a good-looking young man with olive skin and oil-black hair and eyebrows which met in the middle. She was eight weeks pregnant, but not yet showing, and she had not yet told anyone, not even her boyfriend, the father.

That summer, after the trip my father made to Bournemouth for a conference, he took the same coach to the coast and back every few weeks, on his own, just to see my mother, to be handed those warm cups of tea. And half the time the hostess he found on that seaside-bound coach was not my mother, who was on another coach going somewhere else, or she was with her good-looking boyfriend, or not, because he left her when she started to show.

On the last coach trip he made, my father took his tea from my mother and smiled, and asked her, if she was free, if she would like to, if she had time to look around Bournemouth.

He left his fiancée and married my mother, who wore white over her bump, and he brought her home, to his mother’s house.

When the baby was stillborn, my mother dug a small grave at the end of the garden, by the wall, and laid her baby in it, in a shroud at the bottom of that hole, like an egg in a nest. She filled in the hole and planted a barberry bush, and my father clipped and weeded the grassed-over grave and made it neat.

Now, in the long grass, wild flowers flourish, their roots reaching for those tiny bones. Fly larvae have been nibbling at my father’s vegetables, and beetle larvae have been nibbling at the woodwork, and moth larvae have been nibbling at my grandmother’s clothes, which are inside the boxes being carried through the front door by the men, and I hear the slow ticking, the metronomic clicking, of the hallway clock going by.

The empty house has a hollow echo. It must be almost as it was when my great-grandmother first walked through the front door, stepping into the hallway of her brand-new pre-war house.

When the van has left, I lock the front door behind me and walk down the driveway to my car, and the footprints I make are lost amongst all the other footprints, the men’s big bootprints, coming and going in the snow.