After the invitation to come in for cottage pie, Mrs Mack invited me in once or twice a week. She usually invented some sort of task that needed doing; replacing light bulbs or taking her rubbish down to the big bins at the back of the flats. But I didn’t mind.

She used to make me eat fruit when I went round there but there were usually plenty of biscuits too, or she’d made some sort of homemade cake. This was an entirely new experience for me and one I thoroughly approved of. One evening I brought back some scones for Mum but I got a bit of a strange reaction from her. At the time I concluded she was jealous of the time I spent next door. With my adult eye I can see that it was probably a lot more complicated than that. Maybe Mum felt that Mrs Mack was doing some of my mothering, whether she liked it or not.

Mrs Mack had her own son, a bloke called Douglas who lived in America and worked in a bank. She would show me pictures of him with his smiley, white-toothed wife and boast about how well he was doing. Douglas seemed fairly alien to me but even at that age I found it a bit sad that he never seemed to come and visit her.

One afternoon after school, she asked me to get something down from the top of her wardrobe. It was too high even for me, so I stood on a stool and reached over the tightly packed clothes that smelled flowery and old, just like she did. She was after a tin of photos.

‘Do you mean this one?’ I said and pulled out a wooden box about the size of a shoebox.

‘No!’ she said, sharply. ‘Put that one back right now!’

‘Why should I?’ I said, because I was stung, and it made me bolshie and mean.

‘Because I said so, young man.’ Mrs Mack’s voice was ice cold.

I, on the other hand, had flaming cheeks as I put it back and fumbled for the one next to it, a tartan tin with a picture of a Highland stag on it.

She must have seen my expression because her tone softened then. ‘Thank you, Elliott,’ she said, taking the tin from my hands. ‘I didn’t mean to snap. That one is just very private.’

I mumbled that it was okay, but it wasn’t really. You carry those sort of slights as bright, bitter humiliations at that age. You might be one and a half times the size of the other person, yet they still have the ability to cut you in two with their sharp words.

We went back through to the living room and she sat down in her favourite armchair. She had been intending to show me some of the photos, but I didn’t feel like it now.