But then I figured out the plastic and, within a year, I had refitted the factory and we started producing a new line of toys.

Anne was the first doll I designed. She was for Tilda. She was named after the little girl who featured in the stories your mother used to tell you, the girl who lived on an island that was shaped like a boat. Anne who silently climbed trees, who was the master of wasps, and who could transform herself into a fish.

The doll Anne had a stubby nose and fat chin, a mouth open for the bottle. Her cheeks were blushed and her curly hair was painted on, fawn brown, and she had small, pudgy arms that stuck out as if she were asking to be picked up. When a bottle was put into her mouth, it could be moved up and down so that it looked as if the lips were sucking. You could press her cheeks inwards and they would pop back out. The impression of life. She was popular not just in Norway but all across Europe.

We also made toy cars, Volkswagen pick-ups and Mercedes-Benz. American Chryslers with oversized hoods. Tractors and buses, Beetles and racing cars. All cast in thick, durable rubber, solid primary colours. We kept it very simple. Convertibles with passengers sitting front and back. Indestructible, and easy on walls and furniture legs.

There is nothing original or admirable in how I conducted the next few years of my life. I avoided home, your mother and sister, moulded plastic into toys, and repeated to myself the story of your drowning and how it never would have happened if only I.

I was an automaton. Instead of a beating heart and flowing blood, I was a vessel spinning with sharp-toothed cogs and springs. If you lifted my shirt you would have seen a hole in my back where the key was meant to turn. I don’t know why your mother didn’t leave me, but, and this was something we only talked about in her final days (and she was happy again, by the end of her life, I want you to know that, because despair – because loss – can turn into a thing that is precious and beautiful; it can grow into something you cherish, a part of the stronger person you have become), she wasn’t thinking about me either, nor did she care that I was never present. In those years after we lost you, while I did whatever it was I was doing, she was slowly finding her own path out of the black. I wasn’t important enough to be left.

I could have carried on like this until death. I would have, Bear. I would have let life fester until this body dropped and the black swallowed me and there was nothing but black. I would have missed so many things: your mother finally attaining her university degree when she turned fifty-five, or the birth of Tilda’s children, or standing in the silver shadows of a solar eclipse on a hillside in America one summer while that country was sending its youth to fight in another war. The man who’d taken me to see the eclipse? He had just bundled his son away, Bear, hidden him under the back seat of a car bound for Canada to save the boy from being killed in a war that made no sense to anybody. I would have missed it all had I not received something unexpected in the autumn of 1959. Only a small thing, Bear, a letter. But. It was a letter that changed everything.