This weekend I looked at John sitting on the sand, tall and tanned, his muscles made huge by manual work, and noticed grey hairs flecking his hair and beard.

When he left, after Sunday lunch in the Village Inn, I offered to buy him and Sonja a holiday somewhere, anywhere, this summer, thinking that perhaps they need time together. But all John did was shrug and say he had money but no time and I can’t give him that.

31 December 1972

It’s late now. Too late to be sitting here trying to write. I’m drunk again, sitting drunk again on the deck. Getting to be a habit. Is it next year yet? I don’t know. Must be. It’s gone midnight.

We’ve had our special, private Christmas Day. Oh, yes. John and I had our day. We have been in this house a mere eleven days and already we’ve had two Christmases and another year. I woke him this morning and showered him with presents as he lay on his bed. Literally tipped a sack of presents over him as he was waking. At first his eyes widened to screaming when he saw things falling on him - yet again, I forgot to think — but then he laughed, sat up and tried to catch them. He caught books and jumpers, chocolate bars and Turkish Delight, a football and a tennis racquet, Brazil nuts, satsumas, Meccano sets and water colours, Ben Sherman shirts, a Spirograph and a bowling ball. I poured out the horn of plenty, a cornucopia of boyish delights, and if just one of them sticks I shall be happy. I’m in competition here with a formidable adversary. I have to muster all my resources, because he remembers me buying fins and snorkels, rubber tyre rings and surfboards, even water skis. My adversary is the ocean and I can’t really see me winning this one.

We ate Marmite and cheese on toast for breakfast, followed by chocolate mousse, which John claims is his favourite meal but I don’t think he’s ever eaten it before, and then we went to the beach with ham and mustard sandwiches and a flask of tannin-loaded tea. The sun was white-gold and cold, the sand hard, shallow-pitted by the rain of the night. I watched him wheeling down the beach, awkward and stuttering because of his limp, unable to run like the wind. Unable to throw his pale body into the surf. I could hear echoes of the riotous Merboy’s yells as I watched John walk the water’s edge, delicate and tentative. He walked with his hands in his pockets, his head lowered, avoiding the rills of foaming water at the wave’s end. Twice he walked the length of the beach and I sat and smoked, a blanket over me, smoking and drinking tea, fighting the hangover from last night. I thought of nothing, I simply watched my boy walking. And maybe he listed a little, turned his hip to the left with every step, but he was walking. Not so long ago, as I watched blood pulse from the cuts in my hands and wrists, I thought he had stopped breathing. Yet there he was, a year later, walking on the edge of the world.