At the edge of the section was a large eucalyptus that shed long strips of red and silver bark which I sometimes persuaded my grandparents to twirl like a skipping rope while I dashed from one side to the other. When we all ran out of puff we would go and rest beneath the tree, and while my granny caught her breath and my granddad Bert finished a cigarette, I would crush the crisp leaves in my fingers and inhale, filling my lungs with the scent. ‘Inhale’ is really too slight a word for what I did. I’d snort the air the way addicts hoover up cocaine through a straw, and I’d encourage my grandparents to do the same. From starting with bark and leaves, it was only a matter of time before I fixated on the gumnuts, prising them open with Granny Seren’s nail file in the hope that fragrant oils would infuse the water in which they soaked.

In my mind, the smell of eucalyptus will always be associated with heat and summer, clean laundry – and my grandmother. A blue shimmering haze, parched, dusty ground, long strips of silver and salmon-toned bark, gumnuts and brittle leaves. This memory of dazzling summer light and heat is false. For most of the day the garden was cast in deep shade and the air was gritty and damp. But the actual gum tree and the laundered sheets were real.

On washing day Granny would poke the hose from her broken-down washer-wringer through the laundry window, directing the soapy water towards the grid below the downspout. The water gushed in spurts, splashing onto the earth, turning the rock-hard dirt into a rivulet of foam and as she worked, Seren would murmur, ‘That’s nice. That’s right.’

My grandmother prided herself on being the seventh child of the seventh child, and many of the stories she told me centred on her firm belief in her own psychic and magical powers, passed down to her from her mother, and her mother’s Irish mother, who was, in Granny Seren’s words, ‘a proper gypsy queen’. One day, after listening to one of Granny’s more outlandish tales, I must have expressed a hint of scepticism that took her by surprise. In the story a young Seren rode a horse to a glade carpeted in hyacinth and bluebells, which she gathered up into large bundles and placed in a silk bag. She then delivered it to a wise witch who wanted the flowers for a magic potion that would transform the colour of cows’ eyes from brown to blue. The only part of the story I found unbelievable was that my granny could ride a horse. Given that she was more or less the spitting image of the grandmother in the Giles cartoons that Bert laughed over, it was unimaginable to me that she could get up on a horse, let alone ride one.