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perched on bended knees to wind up the twine. It bore the caption ‘Two strings to her bow’ and Kath said it was a pun, but I could not see how. Surely it would have been better as ‘Two beaus to her string’?
    The television set had shiny wooden roller doors designed to hide the screen, as if there was something vulgar about exposing a naked cathode tube. I was sometimes allowed to watch
Torchy the Battery Boy
, 2 after which Mrs Fowler would shut the roller doors with a bang. Beside the upright piano there was a scallop-windowed cabinet full of gaudy fairground knick-knacks that I was never allowed to touch. Their house smelled of polish too, but of a cheaper, less labour-intensive sort.
    There was also something hidden and private about my paternal grandmother that involved tears and whispers in the kitchen, and doors firmly closed against young eyes. The lounge always felt like an offstage area to the hushed dramas that were unfolding in the main auditorium. Occasionally, neighbouring wives knocked urgently and headed for the kitchen, staying behind the door and speaking in low voices before rushing back to make their husbands’ tea.
    The rest of my relatives were shadowy and indistinct. Bill’s sister Doreen was sweet and gentle, married to a kind, decent man and the mother of normal children, but she only met up with parts of the family at their supernaturally tidy house in Reading because Auntie Doreen and her mother ‘didn’t speak’ over something that had happened at least twelve years ago. When Mrs Fowler argued with members of her family, she left scars on them like radiation burns.
    Mrs Fowler had a sister called Carrie who also had caring eyes and some kind of secret sorrow that nobody was ever allowed to mention. Kath had lost her brother Kit to diphtheria, 3 whatever that was, when they were six. She had a sister, Muriel, distant, religious and grand, who had married a Glasgow city archivist and given birth to a congregation of well-behaved children with biblical names. The received wisdom was that we Fowlers didn’t need them, and they didn’t like the Fowlers because Bill was common. At the slightest provocation, Muriel would unlock a gigantic embossed family Bible and read out bits in a condescending voice that gave us the creeps. We would endure an occasional Sunday at their house before fleeing at the first available opportunity. As we drove off in Bill’s motorbike and sidecar there was always a palpable sense of relief, and everyone could start laughing again.
    Around the edges of these characters were the lost ones.
    A sixteen-year-old cousin who had died after climbing under a motorbike tarpaulin to smell the petrol. An uncle who had fallen off a Thames lighter, and his brother who had dived into the fast brown waters to save him – both were wearing cable-knit sweaters and workboots, and were swiftly pulled under by the racing tide. A stillborn baby, a girl who ran away – subjects that were unthinkable to broach. There was a tiny sparrow-like aunt, loud, deaf, coarse, gurning and toothless, called Aunt Nell, whose sailor husband might have died at sea, and whose daughter Brenda was mute, ‘simple’ and uncomprehending. Aunt Nell lived in the basement of a damp Isle of Dogs 4 slum with a foul-mouthed mynah bird, and cleaned cinemas until she was eighty. I adored her.
    It struck me that the War had turned all of these people upside-down; nothing was in its rightful place any more, which was why they seemed so lost. Over all of them, living and dead, lay a soft fog of mystery. No anecdote had an ending, no story was ever complete. Questions were diverted and details trailed off. Where was my other grandfather? Why didn’t Mrs Fowler talk to my mother or her own daughter? What had happened to Nell’s husband? How could the smell of petrol kill you? The stories remained incomplete for decades, until my well-intentioned sister-in-law decided to shine a torch on the family tree,