My father’s father - my unseen, unknown grandfather - was so appalled by his son’s actions, by his treachery in leaving a wife and newborn child, that he gave my mother the small cottage on the banks of the Yealm creek in Noss Mayo, Devon. It had been my grandparents’ weekend retreat but they were so ashamed that they abandoned it to us, then retreated for ever. To say it was small would be understating the case. It would indeed have been impossible to swing a cat in there, because both of you couldn’t have been in one room at the same time. I loved it. Loved to hear the water lapping up the piles as the tide rose, loved to play on dinghies and yachts owned by friends’ parents or summer visitors. I’d spend whole afternoons when the tide was right running the short length of the jetty outside the Swan and landing in the water bomb-style, one knee pulled up, clutched tightly by my arms, spray fluming around me. I made friends for a week, for a day, for an afternoon, and bands of us would walk along the estuary, through the bluebell woods, swinging whippy branches torn from buddleia bushes, up and over the small headland and down to Cellar Beach where the world opened, the first of the Atlantic waters booming just past the Tamar. I was the wild boy who could swim like an otter, who would dive from the highest point, the first to try surfing, water-skiing. I was Merboy.

Sometimes I look back and wonder what my mother did all the time. There were days when we would go out together, the two of us, on trips to Polperro or St Ives, days spent looking in the endless clear rockpools of Crackington Haven, full of darting fish small as commas and fleshy, red-cushioned anemones. We’d crouch down by the pools, unmoving, and in the unruffled surface of the water our faces would be reflected, heads nearly touching. We ate hot pasties and saffron buns slathered with clotted cream, huddling under blankets on wind-lashed beaches. We walked the sands of Daymer Bay and Rock, had pub lunches in Padstow and Helston. I’d sit in beer gardens, legs swinging, gurgling the last of my lemonade through a straw, as my mother sat back in her chair, eyes closed, flawless face turned towards the sun, a cigarette burning between her fingers, a sweating gin and tonic leaking its ring on the table in front of her. I watched the men who walked past look at her and look at her again. We visited the Cornish villages where my mother’s family had lived — mean and bleak, dying with the end of the tin trade and the closing of the Great Western Railway. Yet, surely, all those days number but a few over thirteen years. What did she do the rest of the time?

I realise now that she drank a lot. Not as much as she did later but seriously and often. I think she read a lot, too, out in our stamp-sized garden, full of old roses, hawthorn and ragged quince bushes. I also think she had a string, a thick rope, of lovers. My mother was beautiful then. When I was a boy I couldn’t understand why my father had left — how could he leave someone so beautiful? (Now I know there are many reasons for people leaving others.) My endless, waterlogged days on the river, on the beach, must have suited her. I’d burst into the house at each day’s end, covered in sand, black hair stiff with salt, and she would be sitting in her chair, book open, smiling languidly, glass of wine nearby. It was an easy relationship, a relationship without sharp edges. And then, on my thirteenth birthday, we went to London.