‘I wish you’d have my mother to tea on Sunday,’ he once heard his father say.

‘If that woman sets foot in this house, Stan, I go out of it.’

So gran never came to tea.

‘I hope I know what’s right, Stan, and I know better than to keep the boy away from his grandmother. You can have him round there once a week with you, so long as I don’t have to come in contact with her.’

That made three houses Richard was allowed into, his own, his gran’s, and the house next door in Petunia Street where the Wilsons lived with their Brenda and their John. Sometimes he played in their garden with John, though it wasn’t much fun as Brenda, who was much older, nearly sixteen, was always bullying them and stopping them getting dirty. He and John were in the same class at school, but his mother wouldn’t let him go to school alone with John, although it was only three streets away. She was very careful and nervous about him, was his mother, waiting outside the gates before school ended to walk him home with his hand tightly clasped in hers.

But once a week he didn’t go straight home. He looked forward to Wednesdays because Wednesday evening was the one he spent at gran’s, and because the time between his mother’s leaving him and his arrival at gran’s house was the only time he was ever free and by himself.

This was the way it was. His mother would meet him from school and they’d walk down Plumtree Grove to where Petunia Street started. Lupin Street turned off the Grove a bit further down, so his mother would see him across the road, waving and smiling encouragingly, till she’d seen him turn the corner into Lupin Street. Gran’s house was about a hundred yards down. That hundred yards was his free time, his alone time.

‘Mind you run all the way,’ his mother called after him.

But at the corner he always stopped running and began to dawdle, stopping to play with the cat that roamed about the bit of waste ground, or climbing on the pile of bricks the builders never came to build into anything. Sometimes, if she wasn’t too bad with her arthritis, gran would be waiting for him at her gate, and he didn’t mind having to forgo the cat and the climbing because it was so nice in gran’s house. Gran had a big TV set – unusually big for those days – and he’d watch it, eating chocolate, until his father knocked off at the factory and turned up for tea. Tea was lovely, fish and chips that gran didn’t fetch from the shop but cooked herself, cream meringues and chocolate eclairs, tinned peaches with evaporated milk, the lot washed down with fizzy lemonade. (‘It’s a disgrace the way your mother spoils that boy, Stan.’) They were supposed to be home by seven, but every week when it got round to seven, gran would remember there was a cowboy film coming up on TV and there’d be cocoa and biscuits and potato crisps to go with it. They’d be lucky to be home in Petunia Street before nine.