‘We’ll manage on our own,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve got the pair of you, and you’ve got me. My love is going to be as big as a mum’s and a dad’s put together and it will wrap you up like an enormous blanket and we’ll be safe and warm because we’ll be together.’

‘How big will that be?’ asked Angela, her eyes all wide and her crown all crumpled. ‘That love?’

‘Well, as big as a blanket,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve just said.’

Angela frowned. ‘That’s not that big.’

‘OK,’ said Dad. ‘As big as the moon. How about that?’ And we had a huge hug, where Angela and I pressed our faces into the warmth of his soft cotton T-shirt and Dad clasped his big, warm hands around us nice and tight.

In 1981, Mum came back as a punk. A rather startling one. I mean, a pair of ripped jeans scribbled on with a black biro, patent pointy black boots with buckles, a T-shirt with swinging chains and a black leather jacket proclaiming ‘The Damned’ on the back in white emulsion was not quite the look I expected from my mother, after the four long years since she last came to see us. She stood shaking in the doorway with a studded collar thing round her neck, which made her look like a scary bulldog we once saw on the school run; her hair was dyed burgundy and cut short into rock-hard spikes and she had a lot of black make-up on.

I was wearing a bra for the very first time. Lots of girls wore one already, in my new secondary school, and boys, with the unintentional goal of proving their immaturity by attempting to refute yours, found it hilarious to constantly ping the back of your blouse to see if there was a strap there. As I was laughed at enough already, I asked Dad for the money to buy a Fame rah-rah skirt, but instead went to Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street and bought myself a lightly padded teen bra, despite having next to nothing to put in it. I wondered if Mum would notice I was wearing it, under my Depeche Mode T-shirt, but I don’t think she did. She didn’t really notice us at all, and Angela and I spent most of the visit staring at her.

She was nervous, coming in, as she’d heard on the grapevine (I wasn’t sure what kind of grapevine wound its way into the ‘squats’ of North London – not that I knew what they were – but Dad said she was living in one) about the ‘whole blindness thing’, as she put it, and she didn’t know quite where to put herself.