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pile of boxes that held Andy’s early paintings and schoolwork.
    It was a battered canvas holdall in green tartan with vinyl handles. She’d bought it on a stall on Pontypridd market for her trip to America. She could even remember the banter she’d exchanged with the good-looking young stallholder.
    â€˜Going somewhere nice, love?’
    She’d tried not to boast, but it had been difficult. ‘ America .’
    â€˜Ooh, get you. Well there’s enough room in that bag for me. When do you want to pack me in it?’
    She set the boxes aside, picked up the bag and shook the dust from it. It was heavy. She switched off the light, closed the door and carried it down the stairs to her bedroom. She set the bag on the cream crewel work rug beside her bed, instantly regretting it when she saw the dust smudges it made. The zip was stiff, rusted with age, the vinyl cracked. She persevered and broke two fingernails before she finally managed to open it.
    On top was a photograph album. The plastic cover she remembered as white had yellowed. She opened it and was faced with a photograph of herself and Richard ‘Rich’ Evans taken on their first day at Swansea Training College. Underneath, she’d written Two head teachers in the making . She’d meant it ironically. Neither of them had the slightest intention – then – of pursuing a career in teaching.
    Rich was going to be an actor. The only question was whether his career would progress along the Royal Shakespeare Company, classic theatrical route, or the film star path that led to Hollywood. She was going to be a groundbreaking artist who would create ‘true art’ – or what she at eighteen believed ‘true art’ to be.
    Both Rich’s parents and her own had insisted they have ‘qualifications to fall back on’ because their chosen professions were notoriously precarious. They’d picked Swansea because it had been one of the first colleges tooffer a Bachelor of Education degree. It was also the only college to offer them both a place. And, as they, but not their parents, considered themselves engaged to be married, they’d refused to be separated. Rich had opted to study English; she, art.
    Penny turned the page. Her with Kate Burgess, her best friend since their first day in Pontypridd Girls’ Grammar School in 1959, and her travelling companion on that fateful 1968 trip to the States.
    She leant back against the bed, thought of the letter she’d received, pictured the disfigured recluse who’d written it, closed her eyes – and the years tumbled away.
Swansea, January 1968
    If she hadn’t cut her moral philosophy class to play chess with Rich in the common room, she might never have gone to America. Within an hour of the announcement being posted on the noticeboard, all the flight tickets had been reserved and deposits paid. A fist fight broke out in the union offices over the last two. But thanks to Kate, she’d booked hers before the trip had been advertised.
    She and Rich had tucked themselves into a corner and were in the closing stages of a game. The room was unpleasantly warm. The college could never get it right. In winter, the students either froze or baked. The atmosphere was dense, blue with cigarette smoke, and heavy with the mixed odours of coffee, sweat, cheap aftershave and scent. She was about to checkmate Rich in six or ten moves, depending on whether or not he’d seen through her strategy, when Kate burst in.
    Everyone turned when Kate slammed the door back on its hinges. She looked as though she’d been under a shower. Her nylon mac dripped puddles on the vinyl tiled floor; her white tights were grey with mud splashes, her short blonde hair was plastered to her head but her cheeks glowed with excitement.
    Kate shouted but she couldn’t hear her above the political arguments raging against a background of Jimmy Ruffin’s ‘What Becomes of