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felt as though I would never stop crying. But somehow they got me changed, dressed and shepherded into an outside world which was by now dark with the threat of heavy rain.
    ‘It’s a disgrace,’ Grandma was saying. She had given one of the pool attendants a piece of her mind, not something to be wished upon anybody. ‘There ought to be a notice. Or a chart, telling you what the temperature is. We ought to write a letter.’
    ‘Poor little lamb,’ said my mother. I was still snivelling a little bit. ‘Ted, why don’t you run back to the car and fetch the umbrellas? Otherwise we’re all going to catch our deaths. We’ll wait for you here.’
    ‘Here’ was a bus shelter near the sea front. The four of us sat there listening to the rain hammering on the glass roof. Grandpa muttered ‘Dear heart alive’, and this – a sure sign that the day was, in his estimation, taking a nose dive into disaster – was the cue for me to resume my wailing with twice the energy. When my father returned, carrying two umbrellas and a tightly folded plastic headscarf, my mother looked at him with silent panic; but he had clearly been giving the situation some thought and his resourceful suggestion was, ‘Perhaps there’s something on at the cinema.’
    The nearest and biggest was the Odeon, which was showing a film called The Naked Edge with Gary Cooper and Deborah Kerr. My parents took one look at this and hurried on, although I lingered yearningly, catching the exotic scent of forbidden pleasures in the title, and intrigued by a card which the cinema manager had placed in a prominent position beneath the poster: NO ONE, BUT NO ONE, WILL BE ADMITTED TO THE THEATRE DURING THE LAST THIRTEEN MINUTES OF THIS FILM. FLASHING RED LIGHT WILL WARN YOU. Grandpa took me roughly by the hand and dragged me away.
    ‘What about this one?’ said my father.
    We stood in front of a smaller and less imposing building which announced itself as ‘Weston’s Only Independent Cinema’. My mother and Grandma bent down to peer closely at the lobby cards. Grandma’s lips formed into a doubtful pucker and a gentle frown creased my mother’s brow.
    ‘Do you think it looks suitable?’
    ‘Sid James and Kenneth Connor. Should be funny.’
    Grandpa said this but his real attention, I noticed, was on a picture of a beautiful blonde actress called Shirley Eaton, who was the third star of the film.
    ‘Certificate U,’ my father pointed out.
    Then I shouted, ‘Mum! Mum!’
    Her eyes followed my pointing finger. I had found a notice which announced that the supporting film told the story of the Russian space programme, and was called With Gagarin to the Stars. Furthermore, the notice boasted, it was ‘in colour’, although I for one didn’t need this extra inducement. I launched into a routine of wide-eyed supplication, sensing even as I began that it wasn’t really necessary, because my parents had already made up their minds. We joined the queue to buy tickets. When the woman at the ticket desk took a dubious look at me from her lofty enclosure, my hand gripping anxiously on to my father’s, she said, ‘Are you sure he’s old enough?’, and suddenly I experienced the same plummeting misery, the same emotional nausea that I had felt the second I jumped into the unheated swimming-pool. But Grandpa wasn’t having any of this. ‘Just sell us the tickets, woman,’ he said, ‘and mind your own business.’ Someone in the queue behind us giggled. Then we were filing into the dark, musky auditorium and I was sinking deeper and deeper into my seat in a heaven of contentment, Grandma to the left of me, my father to the right.
    Six years later, Yuri would be dead, his MiG-15 diving inexplicably out of low cloud and crashing to the ground during an approach to landing. I was old enough by then to have imbibed some of the prevailing distrust of all things Russian, to take notice of the dark mutterings about the KGB and the displeasure my hero may have