The tea was supposed to be for the three of us but Mum didn’t seem to be able to sit still, she kept dancing in and out of the kitchen, fussing over side dishes and forgetting to take off her apron when she finally sat down. Mr Cooper ate everything she put in front of him and then wiped his plate with a piece of buttered bread and said, ‘Well, Roslyn, that was delicious,’ which stunned me all over again because I never heard anyone call Mum ‘Roslyn’ – she was Ros to my dad, or Ros-the-Doz.

To make things even stranger, Mr Cooper also said, ‘Now, let me help you with the dishes.’ And he got up and followed my mother into the kitchen. When I went in there, carrying my own plate, I saw them standing very close together over the sink.

You probably want to know how soon after that Mr Cooper came to live with us, but all I can remember is that it wasn’t long before Mum was calling me into her bedroom one afternoon after school to sit on the ‘big bed’. She gave me the spiel that all the kids with divorced parents were getting: ‘You like Mr Cooper, don’t you, Snow?’ And she was all fidgety and anxious. ‘Wouldn’t you like to see more of him? Because I’d like to see more of him.’

In case you can’t guess how that sounded to me, Jack, it sounded like it sounds to all kids, which is just gross. I knew what Mum was getting at – her and Mr Cooper wanted to be boyfriend and girlfriend. That isn’t the kind of thing you want to think about when you’re ten.

I said, ‘I don’t want Mr Cooper living here,’ but nobody cared much about what kids wanted in those days. It was all, ‘Oh, it’s for adults to decide,’ and, ‘There’s no point staying together for the kids,’ and, ‘Oh, kids just get used to it,’ and all that rubbish. So Mr Cooper moved right in and suddenly I had this strange bloke living in my house and no Dad around. And as if to rub it in, Mr Cooper brought all these strange habits with him, like sitting on the back porch and cleaning his toenails with the sharp end of my father’s steak knife, and walking through the kitchen in socks and underpants and a shirt that Mum had ironed that barely covered him up. And he brought daggy things with him, like Scotch glasses with the face of Elvis etched into them that said ‘The King!’ which we were supposed to put on display.

Worse than that, he tried to make friends with me – that was another 1970s kind of thing, for adults to try to be friends with the kids. But it was obviously a bit pointless because I never could stand him and didn’t want him around. So he would say, ‘Why don’t you and I go and do something fun, Snow?’ And I would say, ‘Because I don’t want to do anything with you.’ And he would say, ‘I’m not trying to replace your father, Snow . . .’ And I’d have to say, ‘That’s because you’re not my father.’