Melanie’s father worked in a bookie’s office, and her mother was a housewife, like mine. I think my mother always looked down on Mr. Vernon a bit because of his job. She wasn’t a gambler, and if pushed she would probably say she thought gambling was a sin. Or at least a particularly low form of vice. But Mr. Vernon and my father had something in common. Both were white-collar workers, and therefore scoffed at by some of the rougher factory workers who lived on our estate, who thought of themselves as real men doing real men’s work. They were the true working class, while we were the soft underbelly of the middle class. Back then most people actually had jobs, and it wasn’t being on benefits that defined your class, but the sort of work you did. My father worked in an office as a shipping clerk. It was a menial job, as was Mr. Vernon’s—all he did was fill in forms all day, and was paid a pittance for it—but they had to wear a suit and tie to work instead of dirty overalls, so lots of the locals thought them posh and stuck-up without even knowing them.

In some ways, Melanie seemed so much more mature than me. Her breasts were bigger, for a start, and had started to develop by that holiday. Mine had hardly grown much at all, and it had been like squeezing the water out of a lump of granite trying to get my mother to buy me my first bra. Finally, she relented, but only because I put on a tight, slightly damp T-shirt and pinched my nipples to go out one day, making sure I went into the kitchen to say good-bye, though I didn’t usually. It worked. Breasts or no breasts, there was no going out without wearing a bra for me after that.

But Melanie had real breasts. You would have liked Melanie’s breasts. Most men did. I saw them that week in Blackpool because we had to dress and undress together in the same room. They weren’t huge or anything, but hillocks compared to my pathetic little drumlins. Firm little hillocks. Don’t get me wrong. We weren’t lesbians or anything like that; you just notice things like breasts and pubic hair when you’re reaching puberty. I should imagine boys were the same comparing penis size. When I think of what happened, the cancer eating away at them and spreading to her lymph nodes, her liver, I still can’t help but cry. One of her children, Carolyn, is an English teacher. We met at the funeral, and she visits me sometimes to chat about poetry and drink wine. Sometimes when I look at her, I think she’s the spitting image of Melanie.