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the subject of their POW experience. Certainly my husband still suffered the scars – both physical and mental. Early on, I used to urge him to talk to me, or to remain in contact with fellow POWs, but to no avail. I wonder if your experience with Mr Dawkins was similar?
    Sadly my husband died without, I believe, having addressed himself to the forgiveness of his Japanese captors. An oddness I think in a man otherwise so wholly Christian in outlook and behaviour .
    So, in accordance with what I believe my late husband’s wishes to be, I enclose these papers and leave to your own discretion what you do with them next .
    With very best wishes ,
    Yours sincerely ,
    Mrs Anthea Priest
    The brown envelope was thick, packed with papers. In faded ink I read my father’s name written in fountain-pen by an elegant hand. I began to open it, my heart beating hard. My fingernail was under the edge of the brittle parcel tape when I heard Foxy’s footfall in the hall, coming to see what the post was. I pushed the whole package into the bookcase.
    â€˜What was it?’ she said.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜The post, I heard it come, anything for me?’
    â€˜No. Just some Reader’s Digest win-a-fortune sort of thing.’
    â€˜Your lucky day then.’ She poked me in the stomach with her finger and went back to work, grinning. If I’d shown her she would have ripped the envelope open and seen it all, explored it all. By nightfall she would have been full of plans for books and documentaries. She would have been on the phone to my father arranging an interview. I could not face it.
    I had to go to an auction then, and driving on the motorway to Leeds gave me pause to consider. I did not open the envelope. I still have not, though my fingers have strayed to the corners where the tape is coming up; though I have often stroked the old faint grittiness of it and breathed its dusty smell.
    I decided I would not open the envelope. It was not mine to open. No, I decided that I would give it to him. Not send: the thing appearing on the breakfast table, where Mummy always dumps the post, might come as too much of a shock, whatever its contents – which could, after all, be trivial. My plan was to take him out to lunch. Next month is, would have been, his birthday – his sixty-eighth. I have never had a meal only with Daddy, without Mummy there to smooth all the prickles, fill all the gaps. I thought I would take him out for lunch and if we sat in silence throughout the meal then so be it. But at lunch – a pub I thought, nowhere formal, somewhere with a fire and home cooking – I’d ease into the subject of the past and give him the envelope. I’d thought that maybe then he would confide in me, open up little by little. That I could learn his story not by sneaking behind his back into his private things but through his words, through what he chose for me to know. Because I am interested. Foxy may have nudged me at first but now the interest is my own. And if he chose to say nothing … which was quite possible, likely even, then I’d have to live with that. But I would have given him a chance to talk to me. Which was also a chance that I could get to know him, have some sort of relationship with him, which is something, despite growing up in the same house, I don’t think I’ve had.

5
    It was a long walk to school. Hazel was supposed to walk with me. We would set off together but Hazel’s friend Bridget would be waiting for her halfway, chewing gum, blowing bubbles the size of eggs, oranges, grapefruits even, that never popped on her face the way mine did, but withered gracefully and shrank, grey and wrinkled, back into her open mouth. When Bridget was there, Hazel was completely different. Whenever they were together they talked in these stupid American accents and called me ‘kid’. ‘I’m only fifteen months younger than you,’ I’d object, from