I had to turn away before she saw me bawling. Found myself getting all upset again and remembering the house as it had been when I were a girl. Before the war. Fairfax’s son, Christopher, ten years older than me, sitting at the dinner table, leaning his head on his arm as he scribbled furiously onto page after page of lined paper. Fairfax kept throwing him proud little glances. His mam worked around him, putting out plates and dishing up meat and veg and talking to me mam and dad as if it were the most normal thing in the world to have a nigh-on grown man sitting writing stories at the table on Christmas Day. I always wanted to ask what he was writing but Dad had told me not to bother him. I never did. Never found out what he saw in his imagination. That was the bit I cried for when we heard he’d died. Never getting the chance to ask.

‘Did you know it were getting like this?’ asked Janet, looking around her at the mess, and I thought it sounded a bit harsh, the way she said it.

‘No,’ I said, and I had me dander up enough for it to come out in me voice. ‘’Course not.’

I hadn’t been in Fairfax’s place in an age and I hadn’t been in the living room since I was a girl. His wife were still alive then. Enid. Big bull of a woman who walked like a man and only had two fingers on her right hand. We always wanted to know whether it had been an accident or if she’d been born like that, but it felt wrong to ask. Dad once joked that she’d been born giving a V-sign to the world but Mam told him off for that. She told him off for a lot. Enid died in ’51. Not much of an age. Didn’t look like herself any more neither. Had shrunk a little. There were a lot like that, back in the forties. People who just withered and folded inwards. Got smaller, as though they were moving away from you. It were loss that did it. Loss of something precious. Christopher, in her case. Hit her hard when her boy didn’t come back from the war. Went grey in the space of a week, and I don’t just mean her hair. Something went wrong with her insides. She was buried in the same plot as her son.

‘I don’t know where to start,’ said Janet, hands on her hips. She looked like a teapot in a cosy. ‘Where would he keep it?’

‘I never asked,’ I said, and got one of her nasty looks as reward.