School was in town, six miles away, and I went there too, but Mark spent a lot of time at our place, in the village, and when he didn’t stay over in my mum and dad’s spare room, his granddad was always on hand to collect him with uncanny punctuality and obedience. Mark’s granddad’s name was Leonard, but Mark never called him that, or ‘Granddad’; what he called him was ‘Old Boy’. ‘Hey look! Here’s Old Boy!’ Mark would say, looking out of our living-room window and spotting Leonard waiting in his Datsun Cherry. Old Boy very rarely knocked on the door when he collected Mark, never seemed anything less than 100 per cent available, never stopped grinning, and always wore a brown tweed cap, which – along with the outmoded and modest nature of his transport – prompted me to think of him less as a grandfather and more as a particularly humble chauffeur. ‘It’s OK. I’ll get Old Boy to take us,’ Mark would say, if Mark and I had a plan for a trip where public transport was inconvenient, which, in Devon, on the brink of the nineties, was nearly all trips. When Mark and I went to Paignton, to play the slot machines, or to Exeter, to watch Iron Maiden in concert, Old Boy waited in the car, happily passing the time listening to the radio or reading a tattered paperback by Patrick O’Brian or CS Forester or another nautically inclined writer. ‘How’s tricks, Paulie, my boy?’ Old Boy would sometimes ask me. ‘Great!’ I would answer. ‘You just wait, you boys. It’s all going to happen for you,’ Old Boy would say. But apart from that, he largely just drove and grinned, with what struck me as the most relaxed of old faces. The Datsun was a car in which I never felt ill at ease, whose interior always smelt verdant and warm and earthy, like a greenhouse.