We were sitting on the back steps watching my father working in the garden, and when I rested my hand tentatively on my mother’s rounded stomach I immediately felt a flutter, as if that little girl in there was saying, Here I come, ready or not. At exactly the same time, my father turned around and blew us back a kiss, so with some recently acquired information about birds and bees and all the stuff they got up to, I’d assumed that, somehow, he must have felt it as well.

I thought a lot about that impending breath of fresh air in the following months. Mostly about whether my mother would still have time for me when she had a whole other small person to look after. And as I lay in my bed looking at the framed photo of my parents and me on a trip to the zoo, a little voice in the back of my head would occasionally pipe up. What if I just want things to stay exactly as they are?

One day, I was curled up with my head on my mother’s stomach, listening to my sister growing arms and legs and nails and eyelashes while we watched a rerun of Man About the House on TV, and the voice whispered, What if she ruins everything, this girl who’s coming, ready or not?

But when I mentioned my concerns to my mother, she just laughed.

‘Don’t worry, my darling boy. You’re going to be such a good big brother,’ she said. ‘It’s the most important job in the world and this little girl is lucky to have you. Everything will be OK, I promise.’

Well, if she says I’m up to the most important job in the world, that must be right, I thought. Because she was right about most things, my mother. When the credits started rolling on our show, she leaned down and whispered into my neck.

‘You’re the man of our house, Danny.’

My dad was sitting not three feet away from us reading his newspaper, and I wondered if he’d be OK about that, but my mum winked at me and said, ‘All right there, Ed? Another cup of tea?’ And my father lowered his paper and smiled at us like none of the news mattered, only us.

‘Thank you, darling, don’t mind if I do. If it’s no trouble.’

Mum shifted me away and got up and made my dad a cup of tea, delivered with a tender kiss to his perpetually wrinkled forehead. ‘No trouble at all, my darling.’ And I knew she meant it, even though she’d just secretly promoted me to man of the house.

But when my mother decided to bring my baby sister into the world in our own front room, it did make me wonder if she might not be right about everything after all. I stood in the hallway with my face pushed into the coats, trying to block out the terrible noises coming out of that room and wondering why the hell she wasn’t fighting back if my sister was causing her so much pain. Also what my father was doing in there if he wasn’t going to help, and maybe the man of the house should front up instead.