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Because it’s the only way I’m ever going to explain what’s bloody well gone on here. It started on 26 th August 1963. I’ll never forget that day. I was in the middle of getting my life back after raising a son right after the war. Thomas was a big, strapping seventeen-year-old, in the middle of a training course to be a joiner. He’d been left school less than a year.
    I’d had Thomas when I was seventeen myself in 1946, when rationing was still in force. His dad, Colin Swain, was a little bit older than me. He was eighteen when he got me into trouble. We had to get married at the local chapel and I wore a grey suit that’d cover my big belly.
    No white dress for me. No bouquet. Just two witnesses and a tiny cake. My mam and dad were there, glad to get me off their hands so they could see to my younger brothers and sisters. Off he goes to do his two years National Service, so I had to birth Thomas on my own and look after him on my own for nearly two years until his daddy gets back.
    Not that I’m complaining. It made us closer. We were like two kids playing together, in my little terraced house that I didn’t know how to clean. I didn’t know how to cook either, and I’d go to the shops and ask how to cook things before I bought them.
    I fed Thomas myself until he was old enough to eat porridge, then somehow I managed to keep him alive until Colin came home and his mam took an interest in us.
    Well, Colin really. She wanted to know he was looked after, and that meant teaching me to cook. It bloody annoyed me at the time, and I used to grit my teeth at her, but now I can see her reasoning. She just wanted to see her son safe. I can see that now.
    So Thomas went to school and did ever so well, took his eleven plus and went to the grammar. When he was fourteen he got scarlet fever and missed a lot of school, so we transferred him to the local school. Not academic, our Thomas. No. More handy like his dad. More of a maker. Wanted to be a joiner, he did.
    We bought him a bike for his seventeenth birthday and he’d ride it round like Billy-oh. Him and Phil, his friend, would ride round to a different part of town and drop in a pub for a pint. They would have been hung, drawn and quartered round these parts, drinking so young, but they were after girls and the new music; they rode everywhere together. Phil was courting a young woman from Ainsley Street, but Thomas hadn’t found anyone.
    On that day, he’d gone off to work on his bike. He had an apprenticeship in Hyde; a joiner took him on, training him in cabinet making. He liked it, and even though he got paid a small amount, he gave most of it to me, saving only a tiny bit for himself. Mostly for new tyres or the odd pint. I’d kissed him goodbye and given him a Billy can with tea in it, and his butties. Had corned beef on them. He’d shrugged me off.
    ‘Geroff, Mam! I’m too big for that now!’
    He’d shouted it at me as he pedalled away. I remember I laughed loud and shouted back.
    ‘Never too big for your mammy’s love. You’ll always be my baby, no matter how big you get.’
    Colin had come to the door in his overalls to see what the shouting was about and I remember his hand on my shoulder as we waved him off. We’d gone back in the house and had a cup of tea before Colin went to work.
    I remember laughing again at one of his jokes, silly like, and patting down my hair in the mirror, little creases at the side of my eyes. Colin said they told the story of our lives—if you had the crow’s feet you’d laughed enough. If not, you were a miserable sod! He’d said it that morning and I’d told him that I looked like a whole murder of crows had hopped on my face.
    A murder of crows. Afterward, it was like somehow I had made it happen. Colin had set off to work, both of us grinning into the distance. My face ached with smiling and I’d gone back in and made some food for the rest of the day.
    Teatime had come and Colin came back. Thomas was usually