Dad would look up from the sport or the comics or whatever he was reading and he’d say, ‘Charlie Pasquali might like that, Ros. He can tell his parents he’s getting straight A’s!’

But my mother wouldn’t have it. ‘How can it be good for Snow to be in a class with so many children who don’t speak English? And who even knows what these migrants are saying when they talk to each other?’ And then she’d start going on about how I should be in the local Catholic school and not the local State school, and Dad would say, ‘But we’re not even Catholic.’

Mum would say, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s not good for Snow to be mixing with people when we don’t know what habits they have,’ and Dad would say, ‘I’m sure they’re just like us, Ros.’

Mum would say, ‘They aren’t like us, they’re different.’

Then Dad would get to joking, ‘At least they aren’t descended from convicts like the Australian kids!’ And that would send Mum into a spin because she hated the idea that Australians were descended from convicts, she only wanted me to have friends who had parents from England like she was from England. Actually, I’ve just realised, Jack, that I’m writing to you from prison, so imagine if I’d ever had kids, they’d have been able to say they were descended from a convict!

But anyway, that’s all beside the point because the real point I want to make is that you said the only bad thing that really happened to me when I was a kid was that Mum and Dad split up for a while. The way you said that like it was no big deal made me sick, to be honest, because that was actually a big deal for me, and if you want to know why I’ll tell you why. My dad liked to play cards, and he had a friend who used to come with his wife on pay days to play bridge with Dad and Mum. That friend was Russell Cooper, and his wife was Sybil or maybe Cecil, I can’t remember.

Dad had gone from Victoria Railways by then and he had Olarenshaw Electrics on the High Street. Russell Cooper worked for him in that shop, so basically my dad was his boss and Russell Cooper was to me just another old man, meaning he looked old. He wore singlets under his shirts and his wife was also old like my mother, except she had gold in the back of her teeth, which you could see when she laughed. My mother wouldn’t have been seen dead laughing like she did, she said it was common.

So there would be a knock on the door at seven o’clock every Thursday – this was after we’d had tea and washed up and when I was supposed to be getting ready for bed. Dad would open the door in his brown bridge cardigan with the big buttons that looked like walnuts. There would be Russell Cooper and his wife, and Mrs Cooper would be carrying a bottle of something like Moselle, or else she might have wine in a cask.