The last time I visited my mother, not long before she died, I brought the bag home with me. Inside were all the bandages, pills and instruments that I remembered, all there exactly as Pete had left them the day he went from doctor to patient. I opened the drawers, inspected everything as I once had, then inhaled, and in that moment my father returned to me. Not as the handyman who had renovated the bathroom, nor as the wax-pale invalid curled up in pain on a hospital bed. He returned to me as the father who had smeared sooty grease over his wrists just to make me happy.

A doctor’s note: amber.

I enrolled in American studies at Canterbury University in the early 1980s, a period that’s imprinted on my mind for its protests, collective energy and momentum towards creating a better world.

When I think back to that time, one of the first things I remember is the smell of sewage. I was living with my boyfriend in his rented flat on Breezes Road in Bromley, a kilometre or two from the sewage treatment station and settlement ponds. Whenever the wind blew from the east we would be enveloped in the smell of shit. The scent was not entirely unpleasant. Sometimes it was like manure or silage, at other times like bananas rotting in a fruit bowl, and every so often like jasmine.

Our flat was tiny, comprising three rooms: a kitchen that had been knocked through to the dining and living room, a bedroom and a bathroom. The laundry and toilet were in a lean-to accessed through an outside door next to the garage. Through necessity we learnt to store our toilet roll in an old bread bin for protection from the rain that entered the room through a small, paneless window above the cistern. If we forgot we would have to drape lengths of sodden two-ply over the clothes-horse in an attempt to render them useful once more.

Because my boyfriend was a window cleaner, our evening ritual was taken up with doing laundry. His pile of damp, meths-scented cloth nappies had to be washed and dried, ready for work, and for that reason we had an almost new automatic washing machine, the only truly functioning appliance in the house. In winter we arranged drying racks around the potbelly stove in the living room. Some nights the stove would begin to glow red-hot and smell of molten iron, and the room would fill with cold mist as the moisture from the rags evaporated. On still winter evenings smoke would seep through the joints on the stove and spread through the house in a dense grey haze. Then we’d have to open the windows and swing the doors on their hinges to fan the air and clear the rooms. The fact that we lived in a house with damp, wrinkled toilet paper, freezing fog or gritty smog never struck us as odd.