In my memory my mother’s persona is unchanging over time: iron-grey hair captured in a curious style – a comb to one side at the front and a bun at the back – perhaps the style was fashionable in the 1920s, and it just stuck with her; misty pale blue eyes; that smoker’s cough; a brittle, restless energy, expended in darting movements around the domain of the Blue Plaque House. The rounded shoulders did grow more noticeable with age, and she dropped in height as the curse of osteoporosis kicked in; and the grey hair whitened and eventually, when its daily dressing became too much for her, she asked me to cut it. I can’t remember at all what my mother looked like after I had cut her hair, but I do remember the act of cutting it: the terminal snap of the scissors, the heavy silk of the hair falling through my fingers onto the floor. Because she plaited it before rolling it into the bun, the hair had a snake-like waviness which made me feel slightly queasy. I was surprised she trusted me enough to ask me to cut it. She wasn’t fond of hairdressers, and hadn’t been to one for years. She had had her long hair cut once, as a young woman – perhaps as a fledgling sign of protest - and she arranged for the thick brown tresses to be woven together and thus preserved. As a child I used to play with them. Sometimes I pinned them to my own hair: the colours matched exactly. I was fascinated and horrified by their liminal status: both alive and dead, part of my mother’s material body and yet not so any more. They reminded me of the dead fox fur that used to hang round my grandmother Katie Caston’s neck, its little mouth and paws extended tight with horror.

Man and wife, the book I wrote about my parents’ early years together, was an act of obeisance to the frustrated spirit inside my mother’s edgy body. She never said to me that, had she not married Richard Titmuss, she might have had a satisfying career of her own, but the documentary remnants of her life bequeathed to me and the way she talked about the past, that past before I was born, did speak wistfully of an uncompleted journey.