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summer. She wished she felt able to admit in her letters just what was going on at home, but both her parents were adamant it was something not to be spoken of.
    Yet her mother did seem to understand how much Susan needed her friendship with Beth, and for the last two summers she managed to persuade Father to get a nurse in to help for a few hours each day so that Susan was free to go out. This was quite an achievement because Father didn’t like parting with money, but Mother stood up to him for once and insisted Susan must have a break from chores so that she could go back to school in September refreshed for the year ahead.
    But then in February 1967 Granny died, and almost overnight, the gloom, anxiety and bad smells were blown away. Susan could remember helping her father carry two armchairs and a mattress Granny had soiled out into the garden, to burn them. They stood around the bonfire that cold, windy afternoon, laughing as Susan’s mother brought armfuls of clothes out to add to it.
    ‘We shouldn’t be so cheerful,’ her mother had said reprovingly at one point, although she too smiled as she said it. ‘She couldn’t help the way she became.’
    Susan could picture that afternoon as clearly as if she were looking at a photograph. Margaret, her mother, was short and plump, with grey hair. She wasn’t exactly lined, but her skin was going soft, like an apple that had been kept too long. She was wearing navy-blue slacks and a hand-knitted Arran sweater with a blue and white spotted scarf around her neck. Susan had remarked in the morning how nice her mother looked without the overall she always used to wear. Margaret had laughed and said no one would ever get her back into one of those again, and she might even get her hair permed too now she had some time to herself.
    Charles, Susan’s father, was very distinguished-looking, six feet tall, slender, with keen dark eyes and bushy black eyebrows, his hair still thick and dark even though he was fifty-eight. He had a boyish look that day, eagerly poking at the bonfire, soaking the old clothes in paraffin before hurling them on.
    It was often said by relatives that Susan was a replica of her mother at the same age. Susan could see it for herself when she looked at the girl in the wedding photograph standing on the sideboard. She had long dark hair, girlish dimples and plump lips then. But as Margaret had been forty when Susan was born, and was already greying and plump, it was hard for Susan to equate that pretty girl with her mother.
    Her parents had married at the start of the war in 1939, Charles dashing in his Army Captain’s uniform. Martin was born early in 1941. Susan had often wondered about the ten-year gap between her and her brother’s birth. But she never asked about it.
    All through that spring and early summer of 1967, everything was wonderful. She could remember writing to Beth and asking her to come and stay with them at their house instead of at her aunt’s, and how great it was not to have to creep around for fear of waking Granny, and that they were able to go out to the pictures and for walks as a family.
    But she never told Beth about the transformation of their lives. How Mother would turn the wireless up loud to hear Round the Horn on Sundays, and how the house would resound with Father’s laughter. Or how sometimes Mother would tickle him and they’d chase each other down the garden like children. She thought Beth wouldn’t be able to understand that, not when she didn’t know how grim it had been before.
    Everything was topsy-turvy for a while because her mother wanted to spring-clean and redecorate. Furniture was piled up on the landing and the smell of disinfectant, polish and paint permeated the whole house. Father brought fish and chips home for supper, and they often ate it while watching television, something they’d never done before.
    It was during those months that Susan began to notice how attractive their house was, or