My bedroom is awkwardly-shaped and unfriendly, just as I remember it. Its one window, hung to the side of the room, lets in a mean rectangle of light. Was this absence of light, a feature not shared with any of the other bedrooms in the house, the reason my parents reserved this room for me? When I was first brought here more than 60 years ago, there was brown linoleum and a washed-out green rug on the floor, and my little bed, only slightly wider than a baby’s cot, had been sequestered in the room’s darkest corner. Even in full daylight you needed a lamp by the bed to read by. I don’t remember the decor on the walls then, only, some years later, being allowed to choose a quirky combination of blue-and-white spotted wallpaper and bright red curtains. The colours were completely out of tune with the rest of the house. The rest of the house was composed of matt white surfaces, dull carpets that wouldn’t show the dirt and such an economy of decorative items that the eye was mildly shocked to chance on any of them. Muted furniture sat hoping for a more interesting time with guests. There were a few highly polished dark wood tables and chests inherited from my mother’s respectable South-East London family, and later some blonde wood constructions, my mother’s pride and joy, acquired in the 1960s from new furniture stores such as Habitat.

It was a house bought by my father and made by my mother in a formula rife among the English middle-middle-classes in the 1950s. They bought it from a man who worked in the Ministry of Food and who was delighted to sell it to ‘good English folk’. It was a family home for a family that didn’t ever really, to me, feel like one. There was her and there was him and there was me. I was their child, planted among their walls and their carpets. It was their life. They wanted a child, or at least my mother did, and the getting of that child had not been easy. My mother was four days away from her 41st birthday when I was born during a general anaesthetic in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and a girl instead of the boy they’d already named Adrian.