We were never very close. I was a late child, born of a couple old enough to have been my grandparents. Of course I was fond of them, in my way; but there were no football games in the park for us, no youthful adventures. Both were graying by the time I could walk, and my most vivid childhood memories were of the three of us on Blackpool beach, both of them wrapped in blankets, braving the cold and rain for my sake, while I climbed and ran and built my sand castles alone, and my mother drank sweet tea from a flask and my father read the paper.

Now they still had the blankets, but my father no longer read. That Christmas, which was to be his last, he seemed to have given up the fight, and barely even spoke to me when I arrived on Christmas Day, bearing boxes of biscuits (the only presents I was sure they would both appreciate). My mother, by contrast, was having what passed as a good day: sitting up straight, like a child at Sunday School, wearing a silver paper crown, and stroking a fat brown rabbit.

There was sliced turkey on cold plates, and roast potatoes, and mince pies, and party games, and a weak orange soft drink served in tin jugs and beakers of coloured metal. We had the exact same beakers in the refectory at St. Oswald’s, and it was strange to see them there now, in the hands of the old folk; those papery, misshapen hands that spoke more eloquently than voices could of age, and the fear of the darkness.

“Nice bunny,” my mother said, stroking the rabbit’s glossy fur. “We used to make rabbit pie, you know. Our little boy likes rabbit pie. Would you like to hold him?”

“No, thank you, Mother.”

I’m not a fan of pets, as a rule. And that rabbit made me think of Newman and those St. Oswald’s rabbits, all found dead in their open pen as the boy came to feed them with lettuce and carrot tops . . .

“It was a fox. Poor boy,” she said.

I looked at her, startled. “What did you say?” I hadn’t mentioned Newman to her, or the dead rabbits.

“That’s what we told him. It was a fox. But it was wartime. We had to make do. I told him a fox must have got it.” She gave her sweet and singular smile. “He loved the pie. He told me so.”

“Mother?”

Memory’s a funny thing. I seem to remember more about my early childhood nowadays than I remember of yesterday. That little house where I was born; the square of dirt in the backyard; the rabbit hutch, with its biscuity smell. At that point I’d long forgotten that I’d ever had a pet; but now the memory returned with shutter-click clarity—