I was brought up in one of Liverpool's many quiet suburbs. Most of the area's housing had been built after the Second World War. There was a smattering of schools and small shops, but no local cinema. The only public spaces were churches or pubs. It seemed designed for a certain kind of private life, one that focused on the domestic. My mum was an auxiliary nurse in Oxford Street Maternity Hospital; my dad painted the green-and-cream livery on Merseyside's buses. He also stencilled the zebra stripes onto a bus advertising Knowsley Safari Park and painted the sunflower-yellow railway carriage still on exhibit in the basement of Liverpool Museum. His grandfather had migrated from Wexford. Her family were Protestants from Orange Dingle. In marrying my father, she had converted to Catholicism in order not to offend the religious mores of the late 1950s. They were and remain a quiet, respected, generous and well-loved couple. It has taken me 30-odd years to recognise and admire these qualities.

We had a succession of small cars. The first that I remember was a pale-blue Morris Minor, a kind of soap bubble on wheels. Perhaps my earliest memory is attached to this car: I am sitting in the shady back seat and being handed a warm bundle through the open door. My sister. This locates my first recollected stirrings of consciousness at two-and-a-half years. There may be earlier ones: watching a metallic red fire engine turn circles on the living-room carpet while its lights flashed blue against the blue sky beyond the window; being bathed in a tub in front of a coal fire. Unlike the incident in the Morris Minor these images don't attach themselves to a precise date. As such they exist outside time.