Earlier tonight I looked through a mahogany sea-chest left to me by a long-dead great-uncle, searching for a photograph of John’s father. I found many things in there I thought I’d lost, many things I wish I had lost. I found the shoe-bag my mother sewed for me, which had hung among those of the girls and boys who didn’t make it to the shelters. In it I found a pencil — a two-inch stub of a red and black Staedtler HB — and a rubber petrified by the passing years. There were swimming medals; certificates of scholastic endeavour; postcards from friends who had ventured to Normandy in the early fifties; bus tickets kept to stir memories long forgotten; long-dead, ineptly pressed corsages; the names and addresses of various sailors who passed through Plymouth on their way to where? I no longer remember. What, I wondered, happened to all those boys? All lean and shaved and hopelessly hopeful.

In that chest I found photographs of me sitting with my parents on bleached Welsh beaches, distant, unnamed relatives in tow, looking at the camera with smiles like driftwood, bleached and beached. I discovered a picture of me hanging over the mangy mane of a long-dead, inexpertly stuffed lion on the promenade at Torquay. I was sixteen and gorgeous, the wind-blown skirt outlining my thighs as I bent forward, laughing. I found ticket stubs of concerts and jazz sessions — all forgotten now.

At the bottom of the chest, lined still by the front pages of a 1912 Times newspaper, I found the pictures of John’s father. I found more pictures of John’s father in my memory chest than I found of myself and I fanned them out in front of me, representing the span of a few years. Dai Davies. John’s father. I’d forgotten how handsome he was. I found our wedding photographs — what teeth, what hope, what foolishness. And there were my parents, stout and fine, in the background. Dressed up to the nines, smiling and blessing all this foolishness. Dai Davies never missed the closing shutter of a camera, an opportunity, an opening, the possibility for self-publicity, even at his own wedding, so there are many photographs of John’s father and very few of his mother. Of course, the photographs are small, black-and-white and only two of them were blown up into ten-by-eights. In one of these Dai Davies and I smile for the world, teeth flashing, hair flying, his hand on my elbow. In the other, I suspect later, photograph, Dai is looking at the camera as I look at him. And on my face is a puzzled expression, as if I had felt the stab of a pin in the elbow he had held.

And what of the bundles of certificates rewarding scholastic endeavour? I love those certificates, with the embossed crest of the school raised thickly across the paper. Endeavouring to do what, precisely? Endeavouring in the absence of anything else? To endeavour. That was the remit of my generation — to endeavour. To serve and to endeavour. I went to Plymouth High School with an IQ of 157 and had completed my A levels by sixteen. It was 1950 — what was I going to do? I was an embarrassment, sitting at home, a healthy, breeding female with nothing to do. So I went back to study and I endeavoured. I went to Bristol University and in three years I had my Master’s. When I was twenty I remembered that I was beautiful and that I wanted a life, not an existence marked at intervals by certificates of scholastic endeavour, and I finally lifted my gaze from my books to look around me. And what was the first thing I saw? Dai bloody Davies.