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My mother started staying in bed all day for days on end, making my dad sleep downstairs because she said she was vomiting.

Then she had manic sessions when she stayed up all day and all night, knitting, baking, listening to the radio. Dad went to work – he had no choice – but he stopped making things. He used to make clay animals and fire them in the kiln at work. Now he hardly spoke. No one spoke. And it was time to go on holiday.

My periods had stopped. I had had glandular fever and I was exhausted. I liked being at the technical college and working the markets, but I was sleeping ten hours a night every night, and it was the first time, but not the last, that I could hear voices, quite clearly, that were not inside my head. That is, they presented themselves as outside my head.

I asked to stay at home.

My mother said nothing.

On the morning of departure my mother packed the two suitcases, one for my dad and one for herself, and they left the house. I walked down the street with them to the coach station. I asked for the house key.

She said she couldn’t trust me in the house on my own. I could stay with the pastor. It had been arranged.

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I’m telling you now.’

The coach pulled in. People started getting on.

‘Give me the key. I live there.’

‘We’ll be back next Saturday.’

‘Dad …’

‘You heard what Connie said …’

They got on the coach.

I had been seeing a girl who was still at the school – I have a late August birthday so I was always the youngest in my year. This girl Janey had an October birthday so she was one of the oldest – we were a year apart academically but only a couple of months in age. She was coming to the college in the autumn. I liked her a lot, but I was too scared to kiss her. She was popular with the boys and had a boyfriend. But it was me she wanted to see.

I went round to her house and told her what had happened and her mother, who was a decent woman, let me sleep in their caravan parked outside the house.

I was filled with rage. We went for a walk and I pulled a farm gate off its hinges and threw it into the river. Janey put her arm round me. ‘Let’s go and break in. It’s your house.’

So that night we climbed over the back wall and into the yard. My dad kept a few tools in a little shed and I found a jemmy bar and a claw hammer and prised open the kitchen door.

We were in.

We were like kids. We were kids. We heated up a Fray Bentos steak pie – they used to be sold in flat saucer-shaped tins – and we opened some canned peas. There was a canning factory in our town and tins of food were cheap.

We drank some of the bottled stuff everybody loved called sarsparilla – it tasted like liquorice and treacle and it was black and fizzy and sold in unlabelled bottles from a market stall. I always bought it when I had the money, and I bought it for Mrs Winterson too.

The house was looking nice. Mrs Winterson had been decorating. She was expert at measuring and putting up wallpaper. My dad’s job was to mix the paste, cut the lengths of wallpaper to her directions, then pass the sheets up the ladder so that she could drop and hang them and dust out the air bubbles with her big brush.

Naturally, the operation had her signature-style on it. As a compulsive-obsessive it had to be done until it was done.

I came home. She was up the ladder singing ‘Will Your Anchor Hold in the Storms of Life’.

My dad wanted his tea because he had to go to work, but that was all right because it was ready and in the oven.

‘Are you coming down, Connie?’

‘Not till I’m done.’

My dad and me sat in the living room eating our mince and potatoes in silence. Above us was the whisk whisk of the wallpaper brush.

‘Do you not want something to eat, Connie?’

‘Don’t mind me. I’ll just have a sandwich up the ladder.’

So the sandwich had to be made and brought to her and passed up like feeding a dangerous animal in a safari park. She sat there, with her scarf on to keep bits out of her perm, her head just at ceiling height, eating her sandwich