But the term was over, I had sixteen days away from there, and the afternoon was less freezing than usual as I walked home past the bare horse-chestnut trees on Clarence Road.

When I opened the front door, I heard music, one of my records. Hot Chocolate’s self-titled album. It had been in my room when I left that morning, and now it was playing loudly throughout the house, from the record player in the back downstairs room, Michael’s playroom. Side one, track four, ‘Dollar Sign’.

I took a Jaffa Cake from the open packet on the kitchen table and put my bag down on the floor. The windows of the kitchen and back room were open and my mother and Michael were in the garden. Michael was working hard to move his trike on the grass, which needed cutting. My mother was at the fence, talking to Capability, who was holding a glass from our kitchen, with water and a slice of lemon in it. My mother had one too. She was in a pantsuit. She’d been to the hairdresser and her hair was perfectly Purdey-shaped, and Purdey-coloured. Capability’s hammer was hooked over the fence, with a box of nails balanced next to it.

I went back into the kitchen and closed the door to the playroom. With Hot Chocolate suddenly quieter, I realised I could hear their conversation through the kitchen windows.

Capability was talking about making repairs to the garden shed. ‘There’s a pane of glass needs replacing,’ he said. ‘Bird flew into it and cracked it. Might give the whole thing a lick of paint while I’m at it.’ My mother asked what colour and he said, ‘Not my say-so, but my money’s on white. It’s a neighbourhood that does things white.’

‘Really?’ my mother said. ‘That’d be a shame. We could all do with a splash of colour in our lives.’

She laughed. I’m not sure if he did. I couldn’t see either of them. ‘Dollar Sign’ was finishing and ‘You Sexy Thing’ was next. I took two more Jaffa Cakes and went into the front sitting room, which had our second TV, a small black-and-white.

I turned it on and clicked through the channels. The Lone Ranger theme music was playing over closing credits on one, and the next had Blue Peter, which was finishing too. I ate my way around the outside of the first Jaffa Cake, saving the jaffa part in the middle for last. As the presenters said their goodbyes, their names came up on screen – Simon Groom, Christopher Wenner, Lesley Judd. No John Noakes with his Beatle hair and his mannequin pose. Michael had been right about that. And yet John Noakes was at Madame Tussauds, as a Blue Peter presenter, with his dog.

I turned the TV off. In the distance, I could hear the beat and the bassline of ‘You Sexy Thing’, and Errol Brown’s muted voice.