‘I’ve been saying we should put on a showcase like this for years. We may not be in the most affluent part of the world, but there’s talent. Oh boy, is there talent. And it’s all so raw. They all have so much to express. Who says you can’t have Nina Simone one minute, urban poetry the next? It was high time we got the schools together.’

‘You teach at all of them?’ Aunty Kaye asked.

‘Most.’ She linked arms with me. ‘But Ollie’s my favourite student. He reminds an old dear what it’s all about.’

Gramps winked at me in response to my reddening face.

‘So are we hitting the town now?’ Aunty Kaye asked.

Despite my age, having a drink with Aunty Kaye was fast becoming a tradition. She’d often bemoan the fact that teenagers couldn’t go to the pub like she had in her youth because of an insistence on ID everywhere. It was one of the many rules she found contemptible. As far as she was concerned, I was wise enough to know my limits and there was no reason why I couldn’t ‘borrow a bit of happiness from tomorrow’, as she described it, just like adults could.

‘Is that a good idea?’ Gramps said.

‘Toasting a fine performance? Bloody right it’s a good idea,’ Aunty Kaye said.

It was a good idea, but Gramps looked unsure.

‘I’ll leave you to your evening,’ Miss Morgan said. ‘Take him out,’ she whispered to Gramps as she bid us all goodnight.

‘We could have a quick one in the Legion, I suppose,’ Gramps eventually conceded.

It was always the Legion with Gramps. A swift half in the Legion. I suspected it wasn’t the sort of going-out Aunty Kaye had in mind, though. And I was glad of that.

‘I am not going to the Legion in these shoes, Ray,’ Aunty Kaye said. ‘They’ll stick to the carpet and I’ll have to leave them there. And they were eye-wateringly expensive.’

Gramps grunted in reply.

‘These are cocktail-bar shoes, Ray. Listen to them. They want to go for cocktails.’

Gramps gave a reluctant grin.

‘And they’re off,’ Aunty Kaye said, holding my hand and heading for the doors. ‘They’re walking there themselves. Hold on tight!’

So the three of us hit the town. There were cosmopolitans, mango daiquiris, a dark and stormy or two, God knows what else. By UV light, with bass thumping at my soles, everything got soft-edged and cosy and warm from the inside out. My last memory of the evening was Gramps taking to the dance floor after Aunty Kaye persuaded the DJ to play Elvis’s ‘Suspicious Minds’.