Read That's Another Story: The Autobiography for Free Online Page A

handbag was a faded, pink crêpe handkerchief that, as I read the letters and pored over the photographs, I would hold to my nose, breathing in the musty traces of a once-sweet perfume.
    Up until about six or seven I slept in the room next door to my parents, the door of which was just down the landing that ran the full length of the house. I shared it with my brothers; they slept in a double bed and I in a single. It was in here that on God knows how many Christmas Eves my brothers called me to the window with great excitement, claiming that Father Christmas was just at that moment crossing the night sky on his sleigh, and each time I believed I’d had the misfortune to have just missed him. It was here, sleepless with anticipation of his arrival, that I lay under the covers pretending to be asleep, like millions of other children, and holding my breath as the door creaked open and in he came. And it was here that, one Christmas, before the discovery in my parents’ wardrobe, I saw Him, at least the red tip of his hood, but it was Him.
    And it was here during the Christmas of 1955 that I shared my brothers’ double bed with my Auntie Agnes who was visiting from London. Auntie Agnes was my mother’s younger unmarried sister. In her youth, with her high, wide cheekbones, flawless skin, lustrous hair and pretty mouth, she had been quite beautiful. We were told that she was once pursued by the actor Trevor Howard and was never short of admirers. As a young girl, however, she developed an abscess on her hip that resulted in crippling arthritis and she ended up with one leg being several inches shorter than the other. This plus regular and severe migraines served to completely incapacitate her in late middle age. She would have no truck with men, my mother said of her rather disparagingly, ‘Ah, no one was ever good enough,’ and she lived alone in a bedsit in Shepherd’s Bush. I can’t help but link her antipathy towards men to the rather cold, dismissive attitude that my grandfather, Patrick O’Brien, took towards the women of the family. He had time only for the boys, my uncles, Joe and Martin John, doting particularly on the latter. My mother responded to his cold, domineering nature by choosing my father, a gentle man who simply adored her and thought her to be a cut above himself.
    She seldom saw her sister, once a year at most, and when she did come to visit us, the visit was usually cut short by some sort of argument between them, resulting in Auntie Agnes flouncing out and, in an act of outrageous extravagance, taking a black cab to New Street station to board the train to London. My mother would no more take a cab to New Street station, let alone get on a train, when the coach was so much cheaper, than boil her own head. In fact the only time a black cab was ever seen in our street to my knowledge was when Auntie Agnes came to stay.
    Their relationship was beset by a petty competitiveness. My mother once sent her a silk scarf for Christmas. Needless to say, she had not bought it; it was a gift that had been given to her by a work colleague. My mother rarely kept anything that was given her. All presents were recycled in this way. On receiving it my aunt sent it back immediately with a curt little note saying that she never wore silk next to her skin. During a visit one Christmas to her sister’s flat, my mother, noting the paucity of cards that Agnes, ‘the poor lonely thing’, had received, asked in her best, innocent, little-girl voice, ‘Oh, you’ve got a nice few cards. How many did you get?’
    ‘Oh . . .’ my aunt began, but that was it, my mother came straight back with ‘I had eighty-two!’
    And so it was here, in this big sagging double bed that couldn’t help but conspire to throw its occupants together in the middle, that I have my earliest memory of wetting the bed. It wasn’t the first time, for I had never stopped; it was simply the first time I had felt ashamed. Bed-wetting for me was a