HE MET HER, my English grandmother, on a chilly summer afternoon on the beach at Southerndown. She was sitting on a rock, on top of her coat, smoking a cigarette and he – I heard this from someone, from Daddy or Mair – was enchanted. He asked her if he could sit down next to her and, no doubt because he was such a big and handsome man, she said yes, and he lit a cigarette of his own and she told him her name, which was Agnes, and he told her his, which was Will.

That day the two of them walked along the road from Southerndown to Ogmore, and from Ogmore over the dunes at Merthyr Mawr to Ewenny, where they watched a pot being fired with a blue treacle glaze, and before she left him to go back to the hotel where she worked, she let him hold her hand.

He came back the next week, and the week after that, and every day that they didn’t see each other they wrote to each other, and at the end of four weeks he brought her home for the first time, up on the train to the valleys, and it was there that she discovered something about him that he hadn’t told her. Perhaps she overheard it somewhere, or maybe someone made a point of telling her, thinking it was something she ought to know. Anyway, when she asked him about it, he waved his hand and told her it was nothing. It was a daft embarrassing thing that had happened a long time ago, a story about him some people still liked to tell, but it wasn’t important and it didn’t mean anything any more – the whole thing was a remnant of his youth, something from so long ago he could hardly believe he’d had anything to do with it. Most people had forgotten it and so had he and if anyone ever mentioned it again she should take no notice because he never did any more, and when she said, ‘Really?’ he said, ‘Yes, really.’

Three months after that they were married.

He was thirty-five years old, quite a bit older than she was, and his full name was William Illtyd Parry.

William and Agnes Parry.