Outside the gates, I pause. I wasn’t really coming to the cemetery, this freezing winter afternoon. I was tricking myself into making the one journey I do not want to make now that I’m free from the station. I am less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the house I grew up in, where my parents still live. I turn right.

The great low-rise sprawl of Dogsthorpe – it’s like so many areas of Peterborough. You wouldn’t really call them suburbs: too far out to be convenient, not far enough to be nice. They go on and on, these residential areas, great networks of streets, semis, bungalows, the odd detached place, all in slightly mismatched styles. All the houses are different but they feel the same: some with bay windows and latticed glass, some squat little Victorian terraces – some pristine, with those bits of coloured glass in the front doors in the shape of tulip petals. They all have driveways full of cars or delivery vans so there are very few cars parked on the street – it all has an open, empty feel at this time of the day, before the school run and rush hour. My parents’ house is a smart semi in a cul-de-sac at the far end of Sycamore Avenue, a neat little semicircle of a street that you wouldn’t know was there unless you had to visit it.

Mum. Dad. Home.

My mother would trim my fringe with scissors. ‘Close your eyes,’ she would whisper. And then, when my eyes were still closed, she would blow on my face, to blow away the tiny hairs.

As I turn the corner into the Close, I feel – what? A reflexive feeling of … comfort, is that too strong a word? I often felt awkward rather than comfortable, when I went home. And yet I called it that: home. It was the house where I grew up. The paint was always peeling in the porch – there were wellies lying on their side there that were older than I was; the leaking kettle that my parents never replaced because they couldn’t agree on whether they wanted a jug-style one or something more traditional. They kept a kitchen roll by the kettle at all times, to have something to hand to mop up the leaks. I swear that in the period of leakiness – at least two or three years – they spent more on kitchen roll than they would have done in buying two new kettles, one in each style.