My sister Carrie was born when I was seven years old. Because she was a restless, colicky baby, I spent even more time at my grandparents’ place in order to give my mother a break. Perhaps because of our age difference, and the fact I was away from home so often, I found it difficult to bond with Carrie. When we were together I noticed her smell, a mixture of baby powder and acrid, milky vomit. It was a smell I associated with sickness, hers. I’d talk or sing to her but she would cry and I never knew how to make her stop. I think I was scared of the force of her emotions compared with my own. She was loud and demanding whereas I was quiet. She drew people into her orbit and was often the centre of attention while I preferred quiet spaces and solitude. Later, she was outgoing and extroverted, surrounded by noisy groups of friends and drawn to team sports. As an older sister I loved her and admired her confidence but we were never close.

Seren died from lung cancer when I was nine, and shortly afterwards my granddad got a job making ovens at the Atlas factory off Manchester Street. At the start of the seventies, when he worked at the factory, an advertisement appeared on television for ‘new look’ Atlas cookers. The ovens were modern, but from the advertising you’d almost think they were futuristic. They featured a lift-up door, tilting hob, porcelain finish, electric sockets and easy to clean features. By contrast, Seren and Bert’s stove was ancient. It had three hobs, rusting around the edges, and a small oven with a temperature gauge on its door. When the oven was turned on at the wall it hummed and vibrated and, for that reason, I was never allowed to touch it.

After Seren died my granddad had to learn to cook. I stayed with him often enough to know that once a week he’d make a big pan of porridge that he poured into a roasting dish and placed in the oven to keep. Every morning he would take out the roasting pan, slice off a wedge of porridge and fry it in mutton fat on top of the stove. He’d serve the porridge on a plate, eating it with a knife and fork between negotiating his pieces on the chessboard permanently set up on the table beside him. He ate slowly, and by the end of his breakfast he had usually managed to enter his next move onto one of the cards of his postal chess games.