They had grown up in the sixties, so the idea of cohabiting with a man didn’t upset them the way it would have upset their own parents. They didn’t like it. They’d rather I’d been married—oddly enough, they’d rather I had been engaged—but they accepted, my mother saying what a pity it wasn’t Guy. It was my occupation that really troubled them. Jobs, training, courses, in my parents’ estimation, should always lead to something. “Leading to something” was their touchstone, and this, I think, was why when I decided to become an electrician they gave grudging approval. It so plainly would lead to something. Artisan’s calling it might be, it was in fact my own grandfather’s occupation, and Dad muttered things about clogs to clogs in three generations, but at least it led to security and a reasonable income. Gardening was something else entirely. Gardening was dirty, weather-dependent, notoriously badly paid, and a dead end. It wasn’t a trade you could go back to after you were married and had a couple of babies.

“It’s a stopgap,” I said. “I needed the money.”

The afternoon was unpleasant, as I knew it would be. There was, of course, little else to talk about. Nothing had happened to them, nothing ever did, and that was the way they liked it. The last big event in their lives, apart from my departure, was what had happened on the pylon. That was referred to, Mum expressing the opinion that everything that had gone wrong for me, and she evidently felt that nothing had gone right, dated from the pylon. It was, as she put it rather poetically, the top rung on the downward ladder. She and Dad talked exhaustively on the subject of what was I going to do next? Wouldn’t it be better for me to come home and start again? Had I considered retaking my A-levels? Then followed a series of comparisons with the children of people they knew. One who had been a “late starter” like me, had at twenty-two gone into the City and was reputedly making £200,000 a year. Another, whose first degree had been taken at a “humble” (Dad’s word) polytechnic, was now studying for a D. Phil. at Oxford. It wasn’t for themselves they were worried, they insisted, but for me, my future, my personal happiness. To this end Mum lay awake at night, worrying.