Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Catherine Simpson 2019

Family tree © Martin Brown

Catherine Simpson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover image by kind permission of the author

All images supplied by the author, from her family collection. While every effort has been made to trace owners of third party copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers will be glad to rectify any omissions in future editions.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008301675

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008301651

Version: 2020-03-03

Dedication

For

Cello

Nina & Lara

Mum, Dad

Elizabeth & Tricia

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Family Tree

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Family Tree

New House Farm, the Simpson family home since 1925

Chapter One

Saturday 7th December 2013, late afternoon

I peer into the bathroom and from here the room looks like a tableau with the main character removed. On the wooden floor is a striped mug half-full of cold coffee. I move closer and see the milk cold and pale, risen to the top. Beside the mug is a packet of opened cigarettes, not Tricia’s usual baccy and Rizla papers, and next to that her blue plastic lighter. There are four floating dog-ends in the toilet bowl.

It is dark outside and gloomy in, and the house is filled with a terrible quiet.

Tricia must have sat on the bathroom floor with her back to the radiator long enough to smoke four cigarettes, dragging hard, taking the smoke deep into her lungs and holding it, holding it, for long seconds at a time, before blowing it out of the side of her mouth, eyes squint, then when she’d got down to the filters grinding out the butts and dropping them in the toilet bowl one after the other. She was smoking in the bathroom to help her cut down – she had banned herself from smoking anywhere else in the house because she wanted to be healthy.

On the night she died she was still trying to be healthy.

When did she decide to die? Was it before midnight on Friday the 6th, because she couldn’t face another night, or was it before dawn on Saturday the 7th, because she couldn’t face another day?

Did she think about us? Did she think about her dog, Ted, or her cat, Puss, sleeping on Grandma Mary’s old sofa in the conservatory and who would be waiting for her to feed them in the morning? What about her horses in the stable – Billy and Sasha – who she called her ‘babies’? Did she think about them? Did she imagine Dad finding her? It would have to be Dad, after all. It couldn’t be anyone else.

Did she know what she was doing?

Saturday 7th December 2013, earlier that day

A late start for the Christmas shopping. I call a friend and say let’s not bother buying for each other this year – I need to simplify. I’m tired; only back a day or two from a trip with my elder sister, Elizabeth, and 87-year-old father to the First World War battlefields at Ypres to see where my grandad fought in 1917. We’d planned it for Dad – he’d always wanted to go. We thought it would give him time away from the farm and be a break from worrying about our younger sister, Tricia – although he worried about her constantly anyway.

Now I am worn out and too tired for Christmas.

My husband Marcello, known as Cello, drives me to Haddington, a market town in East Lothian, to begin the Christmas shopping.

I choose turquoise leather diaries for both my sisters. I also pick out art supplies for Tricia: paints and pastels and a sketch pad. She likes painting and drawing. She is good at it.

There is a café in the shop and as a reward for starting the Christmas shopping Cello and I tuck into coffee and scones. We enjoy what I think of afterwards as the last bit of normal life for a long time.

As we leave the shop my mobile rings. I dump my carrier bags on the pavement and root through my rucksack. I can never find my phone. I hate my phone. I have an autistic daughter and over the years I have come to associate a ringing phone with trouble.

My screen flashes up ‘Johnny’, Elizabeth’s new boyfriend. I have only met Johnny a handful of times. I smile as I say hello.

‘Bad news, I’m afraid.’ His voice is urgent and there is scuffling at the other end as the phone is handed to Elizabeth. I prickle with fear and my body goes onto high alert. My breathing stops, my scalp fizzes.

What is it? I can feel my voice rise. What is it? It must be Dad.

Or Tricia. Which one is it? Dad? Or Tricia?

We have been living on a knife-edge for so long I know this is something big.

Elizabeth struggles to speak but eventually says, ‘I think something’s happened to Tricia.’ What’s happened? Elizabeth’s voice wavers. ‘Paramedics phoned from the farm. I think Tricia might be dead.’

It’s as though a great boot has caught me hard under the ribs – a knockout blow to the solar plexus – and my knees buckle. There is no breath left in me. I grip the shop’s windowsill and I am aware of the tinsel in the Christmas display twinkling at the corner of my eye as my face hangs over the pavement. The world sways and I have an urge to get onto the ground to feel secure, but do not. My husband grabs my arm. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

‘It’s Tricia,’ I say, ‘Elizabeth thinks she’s dead,’ and I am unaware whether I am whispering or wailing.

‘Oh no,’ I hear Cello say again and again. ‘Oh no.’

Shock and grief are very physical and it will be weeks before I lose the sensation of reeling backwards, of staggering, unable to grasp onto anything sure and safe that will enable me to regain my balance and find my footing again.

For years it will take nothing but the sight of tinsel in a window or the feel of Christmas in the air to bring me crashing back to this moment when my heart was broken.

The family farm where Tricia lives, near Dad, is in Lancashire. I am in Scotland. Elizabeth is in the Midlands. The world seems impossible and chaotically out of control.

I am panic-stricken and fight the desire to tear at my hair. I sob as I stumble to the car, aware that all around me shoppers still shop, shopkeepers still sell, and for everyone else Christmas continues.

Cello drives us home and I say, ‘I hope Tricia is alive and this is a horrible mistake; if not, I hope she is dead.’ I cannot bear the thought of Tricia in a coma, Tricia in a hospital bed, Tricia suffering any more than she already has over so many years.

We arrive home and I throw things into a suitcase, folding on top a black funeral dress and black shoes. I also put in my iPod which I think may help us choose the funeral music. Everything is in a state of confusion and turmoil and uncertainty but a part of me has gone hard, cold and distant. I have begun to organize, to plan, to try to wrest some control from a world turned ugly and terrifying.

Over and over I try to reach Elizabeth. Does she know anything else? Have I imagined this whole nightmare? But I can’t get through. There is no answer at Dad’s house. There is no answer at Tricia’s farmhouse. Where is everyone? I sit at the kitchen table with my coat fastened up to the chin waiting for Cello to drive me 170 miles to the farm. I am icy, I am shaking and my ears are full of a high-pitched ringing. I am not fully in the room; I am here but I am not here. For the moment I have been removed from my body.

My mobile rings and I grab it. It’s Johnny again: there has been no mistake. The worst has happened. Tricia is dead.

Chapter Two

I expect my dad to die. I do not think he can survive the discovery of the body of his youngest daughter.

After the three-hour drive from Scotland I walk into Dad’s living room, breathless and dizzy.

It has not killed him.

He is sitting in his armchair. He looks at me and shakes his head and he is crying. ‘Poor lass, she didn’t know what she was doing. Poor lass.’ He will repeat this many times over the next few weeks.

I gather the story, about how Dad knocked on the farmhouse door this morning to ask did Tricia want a newspaper? He was going to the shop. Did she want her usual tin of tuna? Soup? When he got no answer he didn’t go to the shop. He went home for his lunch but could barely eat – he felt something was wrong. It wasn’t unusual for Tricia not to answer the door. She had poor sleep habits and was often in bed at odd hours. Still, Dad sensed something was very wrong.

Phoning was no use – Tricia’s phone was out of order. The last thing she’d said to him yesterday was: ‘Don’t worry; I’ll sort out the phone tomorrow.’ He’d dropped her at the farmhouse yesterday evening after taking her for a new prescription because the psychiatrist had been out to the farm and upped her medication. A new prescription had pleased Dad. It meant things were being done. We all lived in hope of new pills and revised prescriptions because then we could imagine that something was being done. Dad drove her for the new pills – pleased he could also do this to help since the doctors had taken away Tricia’s driving licence. He dropped her back at the farmhouse afterwards where she’d said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort everything out tomorrow.’

While forcing his lunch down he resolved to break in – he was now convinced she was lying in bed too ill to get up. He knew which windowpane in the conservatory could be forced from the outside and he went straight back to the farmhouse to gain access.

Knocking the window open caused the whole sill of plants to crash to the floor, some smashing, all spilling soil and grit onto the lino. He stepped through the window, crunching over the pot fragments and scattered plants, and went into the house.

This is when he found the body of his youngest daughter.

He could not call an ambulance because of the broken phone so he dashed back to his own house, four hundred yards up the lane, to dial 999. Then he returned to the farmhouse and sat there, waiting.

I cannot imagine the world at this time. I cannot imagine Dad in the house alone with Tricia’s body.

Twenty minutes later the police arrived, and then an air ambulance landed in the field opposite. As the paramedics ran inside Dad said, ‘I’m afraid you’re too late.’

After they confirmed Tricia was dead the paramedics tried to contact family members for Dad, using an old mobile of Tricia’s with barely any charge or signal. Dad couldn’t use a mobile because of his hearing aid and the paramedics said they weren’t allowed to explain the situation to Johnny when he answered Elizabeth’s phone. Elizabeth was in the shower and as Johnny tried to get her attention and hand her the phone it got cut off. This is what caused the chaotic half-messages that Chinese-whispered their way to me.

Sometime after the paramedics left the farmhouse Tricia’s mental-health worker drove into the yard for an appointment. Tricia had a history of acute depression and visits from the mental-health or crisis teams were daily by then. The policeman went outside to explain what had happened. The woman did not come in to speak to Dad but stayed in her car writing notes before driving off.

Mrs Smith, a neighbour from up the lane, had seen the helicopter land and ran down to the farm. She poked her head into the farmhouse and asked the policeman, ‘Is it Stuart or is it Tricia?’ The officer was relieved to hand Dad over to a friendly face but Dad didn’t want to leave Tricia alone in the house with police searching through her bedroom and her private belongings, tramping up and down the stairs looking for a suicide note.

Mrs Smith eventually coaxed him away. The policeman stayed on in the house, waiting for the ambulance to take her body to the mortuary.

The countryside can be enveloped in a heavy silence and, as the policeman waited alone with Tricia’s body, the quiet must have seemed crushing.

An hour later, when Elizabeth and Johnny arrived at the farmhouse, they told the policeman who they were and Elizabeth made Johnny go and check on Tricia first. She was covered in a blanket. Johnny went to look – this was only the third time he had ever seen Tricia – and he reassured Elizabeth: it’s OK. Elizabeth went to see her but afterwards said she wished she hadn’t.

By the time I arrived, Tricia had gone.

I saw her on the Monday morning. The mortuary was tucked down the side of Lancaster Royal Infirmary in a single-storey, white building. I knocked on the door and a small man in late middle age answered. He ushered me and Elizabeth in. He looked sad even though he must greet bereaved relatives every day. He hesitated outside the door to the viewing room and looked at us, from one to the other; he clearly saw a family resemblance between us and Tricia. ‘She was very young,’ he said.

She was forty-six. Three years younger than me, and six years younger than Elizabeth.

Elizabeth hung back for a second. ‘Take a minute; whenever you are ready,’ he said, but I was keen to see Tricia. I felt I’d let her down by not being able to make contact with her sooner – she’d now been dead two days.

I pushed the door open.

Her hair had been brushed away from her face in an unfamiliar style but otherwise it was Tricia lying there on a table wearing her work clothes – the dark blue jacket and jeans she wore to feed and muck out her horses.

Her hand was chilled. I touched it and asked her, out loud, ‘Oh, Tricia, what have you done? What have you done?’

Chapter Three

The dash south on the day Tricia died was an echo of a similar journey when my mother was on her deathbed seven years before. After hearing she’d taken a turn for the worse there had been the frantic packing of a suitcase followed by the same three-hour hiatus on the M6, but as familiar sights flew by – the bleak stretches over Shap, the promise of Tebay Services, the elegant verdigris dome of the Williamson Memorial – the familiarity was overridden by a surreal feeling of travelling into the unknown and the knowledge that everything in the world had changed.

I was raised in a family of five. Mum’s death had taken that to four; now we were down to three.

Mum had died in the scorching summer of 2006, six years after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her final years were a white-knuckle ride of scans, hospital appointments, inpatient, outpatient, chemotherapy, sickness and terror – hers and ours – with short reprieves when we dared to hope it was all behind us and that we’d be able to re-close our eyes and our ears to death and pretend it hadn’t come so close we could smell it.

We buried her in the outfit she’d worn for a Buckingham Palace garden party she’d been invited to through Dad’s work with the Royal Lancashire Show: a silky blue dress bought from a boutique rather than a catalogue or being home-made which would have been more typical. I took her perfume, her glasses and her handbag to the undertaker’s. I put an ironed lace handkerchief inside her handbag. I took her lipstick and her face powder.

I drew the line at her fascinator.

I put everything in a carrier bag because I had seen someone else leave clothes at the undertaker’s and their underwear and skirt and blouse were left exposed, draped over the back of a chair in the waiting room. I could only imagine my mother’s tight-lipped, you-can’t-trust-anyone-to-do-anything eye-roll if her underskirt and tights were left draped for all the world to see.

Her five grandchildren wrote notes to put in the handbag and did drawings. They wanted to because they loved her. She had never complained when they turned her house into an obstacle course or her entire living room into a den. Unlike when we were kids and she had berated us for making a mess, yelling, ‘When you’re grown up I’m going to come and jump on your settee and see how you like it!’ It always looked as though she enjoyed being a grandma more than a mother.

The day after she died we tried to impose some order on her chaotic kitchen – sorting out, putting away, making space to put stuff down – things we were not allowed to do when she was alive. We’d been embarrassed the evening before when the nurses arrived with the morphine and couldn’t find anywhere to assemble the morphine driver. They’d looked at us, questioning, disapproving, maybe thinking we’d created this mess and obviously wondering why we didn’t sort the place out. Elizabeth and I had kept quiet, aware how ridiculous it would sound for two middle-aged daughters of a dying woman to gaze helplessly round the chaos and say: ‘But we’re not allowed!’

I found her platinum wedding ring in the bottom of a jug in the kitchen. It had worn smooth and thin since her wedding forty-seven years earlier and was cut and misshapen – she must have severed it with wire cutters or pliers to remove it from her left hand when her finger swelled with the cancer treatment or her skin became too sensitive for jewellery.

Dad and Elizabeth said she must be buried with the ring so I took it to the undertaker’s even though I wanted to keep it. I wanted to repair it, to make it into a complete circle again and to wear it. I did not want it forever lost underground.

She did not have an engagement ring to bury because she was the only woman I ever knew who rejected a diamond ring as nothing but a nuisance. She thought engagements were meaningless. You are either married or you are not married – what is engaged? My mother could infuse a single word with such contempt.

I visited Mum several times in the days leading up to her funeral. I accompanied my nephews and my father to the viewing room to make sure everything had been done right; that the wedding ring had been placed on the third finger of her left hand and the handwritten notes and her glasses and lipstick were in her handbag which nestled beside her in the coffin.

As I checked the grandchildren’s notes I slipped my fingers into the silken pocket inside her handbag and found, sunk and hidden at the bottom, a thick gold chain and engraved locket that once belonged to my great-grandmother. I drew it out. My mother did not like sharing. Even though she found jewellery cumbersome and irritating she didn’t want anyone else to have it. Maybe it was growing up as the oldest of eight siblings during the Second World War. When she died she would have taken everything with her if she could. I held the chain up and the locket swung and spun and I felt a fleeting, incongruous moment of triumph. ‘You nearly got away with that one,’ I said and I fastened the chain around my neck.

Later, as I went through her jewellery box, I again felt that reversal of power; I was here and she was not. Her things had been out of bounds when she was alive but now they were not. As children we had longed to sit at her dressing table and try on her beads and gold chains and rub scent on our wrists.

Now all these treasures were ours. There was no one’s permission to ask.

I examined her dressing table, half-expecting to hear: ‘Stop rooting! I’ve got eyes in the back of my head, you know!’ I discovered the perfume was congealed and most of the jewellery was broken. I got her pearls restrung but I never wore them. I saw on the television that you can tell real pearls by rubbing them against your teeth. If you feel tiny bumps they are real, if not they are fake. I went to the jewellery box and took out the pearls and tested them. My mother’s pearls were fake.

I was reminded of when we were children and the biggest bedroom was out of bounds because the roof leaked. It was full of stacks of material, wool and haberdashery, with the odd bucket to catch the drips. When Mum went shopping we sneaked into this room to root among the treasures. We discovered a doll still in her packaging behind moulded plastic; staring eyes, solid hair, her own little kitchen sink behind the plastic too. How we longed to play with this doll but we could not mention it without admitting we’d been where we shouldn’t. Over the years as we visited the doll the plastic packaging got grubbier and more opaque as her staring eyes disappeared behind the dirt. Then one day Mum brought the doll out but by this time we were too old for it. When we took it from its plastic we discovered the doll was so cheap she didn’t even bend at the hips. We threw both her and her kitchen sink in the bin.

My mother had particular hands – hands I would recognize anywhere, with flat almond-shaped nails always cut short. Several days after her death her fingers had gone a creamy pale blue but they were still recognizably, uniquely hers. I touched them and they were deathly cold. It took me a visit or two to realize that the chill was caused by her body being refrigerated in between because, in fact, death is room temperature.

I photographed her hands.

Weeks later I was flicking through the photographs on my camera and unwittingly came face to face with the close-up of my mother’s mottled hands. I was shaken and a bit embarrassed. What would people say if they knew I was keeping a picture of my mother’s dead hands?

I studied the photo and noticed the exact shape of her fingernails, the way her wedding ring had worn a smooth groove in the flesh of her finger before she’d cut the ring off, and I noticed the knobs of arthritis in her thumb joints as her hands rested against the blue silk pattern on her dress.

Then I deleted the photograph.

Death is a thousand tiny losses and each loss is a thousand tiny details.

Why was it important to get everything right for my mother as she lay in her coffin? It was guilt, I think – guilt that I couldn’t do anything else for her, guilt that I couldn’t bring her back, guilt that I had not been able to stop her dying in the first place. My mother had an enormous ability to make me feel guilty even when I had no idea what I should feel guilty about.

Years later I discovered that items placed in a coffin have a name: grave goods. Apparently people tuck all sorts around the dead: jewellery, photographs, sealed letters, rosary beads, spectacles, hats, mints, walking sticks, cigarettes, football strips, teddy bears, comfortable shoes and money.

For whose benefit are grave goods? Maybe mourners believe the item will help the dead on the journey to the afterlife – the walking stick, money, glasses and shoes. Or perhaps some items are considered part of the deceased’s identity, things that they should never be parted from – in particular the glasses. Or do grave goods in the coffin give the living a sense of comfort?

I think so.

In fitting my mother up with a bag and glasses and notes and her fanciest dress I took comfort from having done the best I could.

We arranged to bury Mum in the local village churchyard, a row further on from her own mother and father. We explained this to the undertaker at a meeting in Dad’s kitchen. The undertaker took notes on a clipboard and my father said, ‘Dig it deep and leave enough room for me,’ and Tricia, speaking up for the first time since the meeting began, said, ‘Dig it even deeper and leave enough room for me too.’

Chapter Four

Every wall, every gateway and every tree on the lane leading to the farmhouse held a memory of Tricia. On my right was the wooden fence we leaned on to watch the mating ducks when she was five or six. ‘What they doing?’ she asked. ‘Makin’ friends,’ I said. On my left was the verge where our neighbour parked his flatbed truck – our stage for the plays I wrote, heavily influenced by Enid Blyton, in which I cast Tricia and Janet-from-next-door, mainly as dolls or fairies. (Play: A Lot of Rice for Tea; Characters: Rag Doll, Dancer Doll, Fairy Doll, Dolly Doll and six ‘Chinease’ Dolls.)

Me and Tricia in front of the wall we used as a stage and a catwalk

Past the verge was the head-high yard wall we balanced along for ‘playin’ bally’, never having had a ballet lesson. We took turns wearing a dog-eared 1950s evening dress donated to the dressing-up box by Great-Aunty Margaret and we ‘did twizzers’– arms outstretched and on tiptoes – until we legged ourselves up. At right angles was the stone garden wall we used as a stage to play ‘Miss World’, during which we draped ourselves in stuff from Mum’s ragbag. Elizabeth was compère and held a spoon or a drumstick for a microphone – ‘And in national dress, please welcome Miss Guam’ – as I set off down the wall wearing a 1940s tea-dress tied round with a tablecloth. ‘Next up, in her evening frock, it’s Miss Ceylon,’ and Tricia tottered down the wall wearing her vest, with a 1920s shawl around her waist and bits of broken chain-belt in her hair. On one occasion we used the wall as a catwalk for a fashion show with dresses we made from old cow-feed sacks, with holes cut for heads and arms and tied up with bale twine. The sacks made a ‘mini’ for Elizabeth, a ‘midi’ for me and a ‘maxi’ for Tricia, and left us covered in hundreds of tiny insect bites. We sampled the cow food-pellets – finding them salty and gloopy when chewed – but tried to forget about that fifteen years later when mad cow disease was all over the papers.

The day after Tricia died I was drawn back down the lane from Dad’s to the farmhouse, by a sense of disbelief, I think – a sense heightened by the many surrounding memories. The mortuary was closed for the weekend so I had not yet visited her body and I needed evidence it had happened; to see Tricia’s world without her in it, to check she was really gone.

Tricia beside the knicker bush, dressed as ‘Miss Ceylon’

Inside, the house smelled of stale tobacco – a smell that hit me then like a punch and still does. To me the smell of stale tobacco is the smell of anguish and hopelessness.

I stood at the door of the bathroom with its cold coffee and cigarettes on the wooden floor by the radiator. I moved about the house where I was born, a place that since yesterday had become the place Tricia had chosen to die.

In the living room I saw the lights were lit on the CD player. It was playing with the volume turned down – Tricia must have left it on a continuous loop. I squatted down to turn it up and the room filled with the pure, clear voice of Alison Krauss singing ‘When You Say Nothing At All’. The suddenness knocked me over and from a squatting position I plumped sideways onto the carpet.

In the kitchen I found the bin full of her long dark hair. I stared at it; so unexpected. She must have chopped it off last thing before she died because there was nothing thrown on top. Why had she cut her hair off? I did not reach into the bin and rescue a lock because the sight of her lovely hair there among the teabags and the soup tins reeked of despair and I couldn’t bear to touch it. Her long hair had been one of her trademarks ever since her early teens. There had been the occasional perm in the 1980s and it got shoved into a woolly hat when she was milking the cows or working with the horses, but it had never been anything other than long and dark and glossy, and now here it was tossed in the rubbish.

On the kitchen surfaces I found boxes and boxes of lotion for getting rid of hair lice. Tricia did not have hair lice; at that stage she didn’t have close enough contact with anyone to catch hair lice. I examined the boxes, baffled and heartbroken because these boxes reeked of despair too.

I learned later that a symptom of psychosis can be the sensation of a crawling on the skin that is impossible to alleviate. Memories of those boxes, and knowledge of the effort it must have taken Tricia to get out of the house and buy them for a problem she believed she had, swim into my mind often and have crystallized into the very image of loneliness.

I went into her bedroom but hated to look at her bed with the sheets and quilt in a tangled heap and some of the last items of clothing she had worn discarded on the floor. Signs of activity made her seem so close and underlined how recently she had been alive, how recently we should have been able to save her. The finality of death and the knowledge – although still not the belief – that she had gone shocked and re-shocked me over and over again every time my eyes alighted on some other personal item: her bedside glass of water, her toothbrush, her gum shield for stopping her grinding her teeth as she slept. The air was thick. It was as though the house itself was holding its breath.

I pushed open the door of my childhood bedroom – the familiar rattle of the latch, the whoosh of the door over the old shag-pile carpet – only to discover it had become a dressing room full of beautiful clothes. Tricia had been a farmer and a horsewoman; I remembered her in jeans and jumpers and grubby jackets with bits of straw clinging to them or maybe in a boiler suit, the top pulled down and tied round her waist as she wore a T-shirt in summer. This room used to contain two single beds and an ugly chest of drawers; now it appeared to contain a wardrobe and hanging rail stuffed with posh frocks. I found it hard to take in. I walked into the room and touched the hanging clothes. I could see a black satin halter-neck covered in red and yellow orchids and a black chiffon minidress with beaded cuffs, and alongside them were linen skirts, wool coats, silk blouses, fitted jackets, piles of scarves in every shade and texture, shelves of extraordinary shoes: gold sandals, red silk sandals, purple suede peep-toes, silver wedges and sparkly stilettos.

There were other items folded in big stiff carriers with the names of local boutiques on the side and with their labels still attached along with handwritten invoices for hundreds of pounds. So this was how Tricia had been spending her inheritance from Mum. There were clutch bags, large and small, in every colour. The wardrobe was full, as was the hanging rail which stood beside a full-length tilting mirror. It was a room devoted to glamour and beauty and femininity. I knew my sister was beautiful but I had not realized she possessed all these lovely things, or that she cared so much about her physical appearance.

Over the following months Elizabeth and I picked out pieces and took them home. Tricia was taller and more willowy than us, though, and one by one most of the outfits ended up at the charity shop.

My sister had shocked me by killing herself but maybe there were many things I didn’t know about her even though I had known her all her life, and almost all of mine. I had loved her. Things had been difficult as her mental health deteriorated, but I had always loved her.

All my life one gauge I used to decide if someone was acting unreasonably towards me was to ask myself: ‘Would I let them treat Tricia this way?’ I had always felt protective of her but in that I had clearly failed. I sat on the bed gazing in amazement at all these unfamiliar possessions – the possessions of a different woman altogether from the one I thought I knew – and I wondered: how well had I known her? How well can we ever know anyone?

As I sat in the farmhouse, dazed, the telephone engineer arrived to mend the phone. He thought the problem was a fault with an overhead wire, he said. He was standing at the back door and I told him what had happened the day before. His face became stricken and his eyes flickered over my shoulder as though drawn to witness the trauma. He picked up his enormous toolbag and headed into the garden to do the repair. An hour later he reappeared. It was all fixed, he said, but in future could we get Dad to build his enormous bonfires somewhere else. He gave me a meaningful look and cast a furtive glance towards the orchard, then mouthed the words ‘or they’ll charge him a fortune’, and with a tap on the side of his nose he was gone. An act of kindness from the telephone man seemed enormously significant. In those first raw days I latched onto all small acts of kindness and humanity.

We buried Tricia in her dressage gear – jodhpurs, fitted dark blue jacket, white shirt with a stock around the neck – and we put her riding crop in her hand. I never saw Tricia practising dressage, even though she had been doing it for some years, because she was shy about being watched. But I knew how much pride she took in it. I knew, on a good day, how enthusiastically she’d tell you about her ‘perfect trot–canters’ and her ‘flying changes’. My memories of Tricia riding were of the less-controlled variety. For instance, the first time she was put on the back of a friend’s horse, aged six or seven, and the horse bolted down the lane. I remember the screams of the friend’s mother and the panic followed by the relief when the horse was captured and led back – with Tricia still in the saddle, an enormous grin on her face.

As we prepared Tricia’s outfit, Alice, a lady from the village, showed me how to tie the stock so I could explain it to the undertaker. We couldn’t find Tricia’s stock pin so Alice went home and brought back a gold stock pin with a little horseshoe on it which strangely looked like a symbol of good luck. Elizabeth spent hours polishing Tricia’s riding boots to a glassy sheen, all the time aware that the undertaker might have to slice right up the back to get them on.

There was a line of framed photographs along Tricia’s mantelpiece in the farmhouse kitchen showing her Labrador, Ted, and her old collie, Roy, alongside pictures of her long-gone mare Hattie shoving her head over the denim-blue stable door. We took these photographs, and one of Dad sitting on the old water trough with Roy smiling at his feet, and placed them around her in the coffin.

It was months before I realized that the only photograph we left behind on the mantelpiece was one of the whole family together: my mum (Margaret), dad (Stuart), Elizabeth, Tricia and me, at a family wedding smiling in our Sunday best.

Dad, Mum, Me, Tricia and Elizabeth at Cousin Mary’s wedding

Maybe in choosing the photographs of her animals to go in her coffin – as her ‘grave goods’ – we had unconsciously acknowledged that animals were a constant source of comfort to her and had never let her down whereas we, her family, had.

The eventual emptying of the farmhouse after Tricia died, a job we put off again and again for months, was a huge task because my grandparents, David and Marjorie, had moved into the farm in 1925 and it seemed little had been cleared out since; consequently generations of belongings had composted over the years and it felt as though we were unearthing an architectural dig. The process of untangling our past called for decision after decision which seemed to accumulate in weight as we progressed.

In fact some of the clearing had been done, in 2005, eight years before Tricia died, when we sold the old barns for development. At that time the great hay barn, the cowsheds, the old stables and pig pens had to be emptied of what amounted to my mother’s ‘overspill’. My mother was a shopper. In particular she was a shopper of wool and cloth, sewing paraphernalia and gadgets. She loved gadgets for cleaning, gadgets for cooking, gadgets for sewing and knitting. My mother had an eagle eye for advertisements featuring anything newfangled that came with an instruction book – things that made big promises about saving time and labour – and she would seek out these expensive gadgets and buy them. Her idea of a birthday outing was a drive to Lakeland Plastics in its original Lakeland home to buy more gadgets.

When it came to the clearing of the barns in 2005 we were faced with chest freezers and suitcases and cardboard boxes full of mouldy wool and bolts of cloth still with their labels attached showing the size and price – which was always startlingly high – plus baffling gadgets that had never been assembled: gadgets for cleaning windows, steaming carpets, cutting out dress patterns, assembling quilts and knitting complex designs.

Anyone would think my mother enjoyed cleaning and housework, but this was not true; in fact she despised the excessively house-proud. She liked to declare that only boring women had tidy houses. I suppose her constant purchase of gadgets for cleaning was a way to make housework more interesting, or at least put it off for a while in favour of another shopping trip. But she adored handicrafts and, after packing the farmhouse to the gunwales with cotton bobbins, buttons on cards, zips in every colour and endless dressmaking patterns, as well as the wool and cloth, she set to filling the barns and outhouses with her haberdashery as well.

In the year 2000 Mum and Dad moved out of New House Farm to a newly built dormer bungalow up the lane. Tricia was left to live alone in the farmhouse, much to her satisfaction, although she was less thrilled when she realized the house was to be left still packed with stuff because, as it turned out, although my mother had moved she still reigned supreme – now over two houses – and her possessions left behind in the farmhouse and barns (until the barns were sold) must not be touched. Meanwhile Mum set about filling her new house with stuff too.

My mother’s mood – often low and downbeat – could be transformed by ‘newness’. She was excited by technology and innovation. She bought shares in the Channel Tunnel as soon as it was possible, went to ‘computer classes’ before I ever did, and invested in bio-tech companies, enthusiastically telling you which diseases her investments were about to cure. She was dismissive of self-appointed gurus who advised you on how to live your life (‘Huh! Who says? Experts!’) but admired inventors and scientists.

She didn’t like to see me hand-sewing even though I found it satisfying. When I was twelve years old I stitched a patchwork quilt and she would watch me, her hands twitching, frustrated. ‘You’d do it much quicker on a machine,’ she kept saying. My needle and thread flew over the quilt in a ham-fisted front to back motion, producing stitches so neat and tiny they were barely visible. ‘Leave her,’ said Dad. ‘Let her do it if she likes it.’

When we sold the barns in 2005 we also sold the outhouse that had been used by my Grandad David – Dad’s father – who we always called ‘Gran’. This outhouse, known as ‘Gran’s Dairy’, was Edwardian red-brick and had been used by Gran’s wife, Marjorie, to make cheese in the 1920s and 30s. Inside it was floor to ceiling white tile with a monumental cheese press. When I was growing up in the 1970s the back room of the dairy was Gran’s den and he spent every evening in there sitting in his old armchair, with his fuzzy black and white television, his wireless set, his crate of brown ale and his stack of Westerns from the mobile library.

David (‘Gran’) and Grandma Marjorie married and moved to New House in 1925

The farm collie and next door’s terrier and our half-feral cats joined him in front of his two-bar electric fire and under the halogen pig lamp that shone orange on his white hair to keep him warm. Cats draped themselves about his shoulders and perched on his head to share the warmth and he didn’t mind a bit. He would chew lumps of bacca he had cut off rope-like tobacco he called ‘twist’ with his penknife, eventually spitting the stuff out on the stone floor, like some character from the Wild West, where the dog would eat it.

Gran had retreated to his den when my mother and father married in the late 1950s. By then he had been widowed many years following Grandma Marjorie’s death in childbirth. Gran lived with us almost until his death, outliving Marjorie by fifty years.

He was known to almost everyone as Gran, possibly because Elizabeth couldn’t say Grandad as a toddler, although in fact no one really knew, and we didn’t bat an eyelid to hear ‘Gran’s having a shave’ or ‘Gran needs more bacca’ or ‘Gran’s checking his mowdy traps’. One of Gran’s hobbies was catching moles (‘mowdies’). He set vicious claws into the ground to crush the creatures as they burrowed between molehills which ruined the grass. I once discovered a mole rooting up the seedlings in a tray of baby lettuce on the back yard. My schoolfriend and I raced to save it as Gran hovered nearby shouting ‘Kill it! Kill it!’

He used the same penknife for cutting bacca, paring his nails, peeling apples and setting his mowdie traps. The penknife lived in the pocket of the old coat he always wore over his ancient trousers and jacket, and which was wrapped round at the waist with a length of baling twine.

By the 1970s Gran’s Dairy was lined with Marjorie’s old cheese shelves which were packed with the flotsam and jetsam of his farming life: decoy ducks, empty milk bottles and rolls of wire, all coated in a thick layer of aged dust. Pushed up against them was his armchair, ingrained with grime and packed with newspapers where the springs used to be.

Bit by bit Gran’s Dairy filled up with broken furniture that Mum wouldn’t have in the house: legless chairs, chairless dining tables, overwound clocks and a wooden fire surround, all dating from Marjorie’s day and too precious to Gran to throw away. The only things my mother seemed to want to get rid of were things that were precious to other people.

When one of the cats died on a sofa in there, another cat flattened the body and turned it into a bed before anybody noticed.

One day a barometer slid from the wall and smashed. Mercury rolled around the stone floor and we stamped on it watching it shatter and gather itself like the quicksilver it was until it finally splintered and was lost down the joins and the cracks.

Gran came into the farmhouse to sleep and to eat his meals. He would peer through the kitchen door to see what was on the table and if it had a crust or a hard skin he’d go back for his teeth. He ate everything; fat, gristle, the lot, both courses from the same plate, wiping it clean in between with a slice of bread. ‘You don’t know you’re born,’ he’d say if he caught me wrinkling my nose at the sight of custard covering traces of gravy.

Visiting children found Gran intimidating but he had a sense of humour – as dry as dust and well hidden. One time I remember hearing his rumbling chortle was when a caterpillar, boiled in its entirety, rolled out of a cauliflower floret I’d just chased round my dinner plate.

On our birthdays he gave us fifty pence. He’d root through his pockets, sorting handfuls of washers and bits of straw, until he found a silver coin which he’d look closely at then hand over with a faint chuckle. Life was tough and we’d better get used to it.

He was a veteran of the trenches at Ypres where he was shot through the shoulder. In hospital in Boulogne he learned to thank the nurses – mercy boo coo.

When he was an old man he said little. Aged twelve I went out to his dairy with my notebook and pencil to ask him questions for a school project about ‘The Olden Days’.

‘Gran, when you were little what did you do on a Sunday?’

He tamped his pipe and puffed a bit to get it going.

‘Put on me fustian breeches and watched tide, ’appen.’

I wrote: ‘watched tide’.

‘What did you do during the war?’

He did a silent kind of a snort, thought about it a minute then put his head back.

‘War … huh.’

As an adult when I reminisced about Gran spending time in his dairy, my dad’s sister, Aunty Margaret (another one), was upset that he should be remembered thus. She recalled him during her childhood as ‘a smart man’ whose successful efforts to keep his family together, despite the death of his wife, were nothing short of heroic.

Gran fought in the trenches at Ypres in the First World War

Not all the furniture from Marjorie’s day ended up in Gran’s Dairy. A mahogany glass-fronted cabinet stacked with silver tea services, dating from David and Marjorie’s wedding, and with drawers full of sepia photographs, remained in the farmhouse sitting room. If we opened the drawers and asked about the people in the photographs, Mum told us: ‘Shut that drawer and stop rooting.’

Years later, when we took the photographs from the drawer and tried to work out who they were, there was nobody left to ask and all we had was a sea of sepia strangers whose lives and stories were lost to the past.

Gran kept leather-bound farm diaries detailing animals that went to market, crops planted and cheese produced. On 15th May 1938, the day his wife died in childbirth, it says only ‘M died’ and after that there are no more entries. He found my dad who was milking the cows that day and, shaking his head, said, ‘Never mind,’ then with another four children to think about, including a newborn baby, he left my dad to finish the milking.

My twelve-year-old dad never went to school again. The truant officer poked his head into the barn every so often as my dad forked hay or fed the calves. ‘Try to get to school today, eh?’

Eighty years later my dad keeps a postcard in his desk, addressed to ‘Master Stuart Simpson’, sent by his mother from hospital in Preston as she waited to give birth. The card shows a painting of a spaniel. ‘Wasn’t Preston lucky on Saturday. I heard it on the wireless. Hope you are doing your best for Daddy.’

He still cries when he sees it.

Also in his desk is the bill from the hospital for the maternity services his mother received. A bill issued to her husband after her death.

Grandma Marjorie was survived by her baby girl, who was also named Marjorie. As a girl, Young Marjorie was red-haired and sparky. She worked on the farm, throwing herself into everything – baking with gusto and covering herself and the kitchen with flour, chopping logs and accidentally hacking her finger-end off with the axe. She got engaged to a local undertaker called John but Young Marjorie had a digestive disorder and no one realized how serious it was until she collapsed and died. Instead of being married in 1959 she was buried. This was four years before I was born. She was twenty-one.

Young Marjorie, aged 21, the year she died

I think it was in 2005 that the Kilner jars of damsons, picked from the orchard and bottled by Young Marjorie, and that had been lining the far-pantry shelves my entire life, were finally thrown out.

It took me a long time to realize that Grandma Marjorie was so scarcely mentioned I didn’t have a proper name for her and had settled on ‘Dad’s Mum’. Stories about her were rare not because nobody cared but because Dad and Gran cared so much. On this subject, as on so many others, we were dumbstruck.

In my lifetime the cupboard halfway up the farmhouse stairs had been painted shut with layer upon layer of thick gloss paint. As a child I pressed my eye to the keyhole, shone in a torch and saw book spines untouched for more than twenty years.

Books were my escape from a world with the wrong kind of drama in it. I hungered for stories and books to make reality fall away.

I read to find circuses, wild animals, long dresses, castles, enchanted forests and magic faraway trees. Re-entering real life after being lost in a book was painful and disorientating.

At the table I read the back of the cereal packet. I read the primary-school library over and over again. I read the set texts Elizabeth brought home from secondary school: Animal Farm, White Fang, The Otterbury Incident. I read the Daily Express. I read the Radio Times. When I ran out of stories I read the dictionary. I compiled my own dictionary of words I didn’t understand. ‘Tippet: a woman’s shawl; Brougham: a horse-drawn carriage; Stucco: plaster used for decorative mouldings’ reads the list, in what must have been a Georgette Heyer phase.

Until sixth-form college my reading was unguided so I read Tender is the Night but not The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina but not War and Peace, Lady Chatterley’s Lover but not Women in Love. I chose books from Garstang Library purely on covers and titles. I read the entire works of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, fascinated by their versions of English country houses. I read everything Catherine Cookson wrote and pronounced ‘whore’ with a ‘w’.

My mother brought back library books in the Ulverscroft Large Print series for me, knowing I wore glasses without understanding they were for distance not for reading. Producing a child who needed glasses was perturbing for my mother: ‘I fell down stairs when I was expecting. I didn’t make such a good job of you.’ I never told her I could read small print perfectly well, because I liked getting lost in the great big words.

But my mother did give me occasional random compliments. ‘Your ears lie good and flat. The back of your head is well shaped. Your eyebrows suit your face.’

I was short of books and often panicked about it, so one day I prised open the cupboard door on the stairs as the hinges made sharp cracking sounds and splinters of paint flaked off. Inside were dusty and faded hard-backed books. I inched one out and shut the door, pressing the cracked paint on the hinges back into place. The book was Sue Barton, Senior Nurse and was signed on the flyleaf ‘Marjorie Simpson, 1956’.

I took it downstairs and sat on the hearthrug in front of the open fire. My mother said: ‘What’s that? It looks like rubbish.’ I struggled through a few pages but there was no adventure here; it seemed to be about nothing but a nurse in trouble with ‘Sister’ for being on the ward with her ‘slip’ showing. My mother was right, it was rubbish. I squeezed my hand again between the painted-up doors, scraping my knuckles as I put Aunty Marjorie’s book back in the past.

I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I’ve been able to read. I wrote my first book aged nine in a hard-backed Silvine notebook with marbled endpapers. It chronicled the adventures of ‘Sandra’ and ‘Barbara’ – two girls who apparently went everywhere (mainly to dancing lessons) on horseback and had a sworn enemy called Mr White. My best friend, Alex, and I acted out the adventures of Sandra and Barbara every day in the school playground.

My writing ambitions faltered after that because writing became embarrassing; self-indulgent and pointless, particularly after a boyfriend found something I’d written when I was a teenager and flicked through with a sneer on his face. ‘What is this? What do you think you are – a writer?’ Later I discovered he had scrawled in the margin ‘This is stupid’, in case I hadn’t got the message.

My mother read gardening books, dressmaking books, yoga books and recipe books, but no fiction. She referred to fiction as ‘made-up stuff’, and asked ‘why do you read that?’

I left school at eighteen with dismal A-level results and became a bank clerk then a civil servant, jobs taken for the sake of taking a job – because that’s what you did. I also had to pay the mortgage I’d saddled myself with aged nineteen – because buying a house was something else that you did. In my mid-twenties I retrained as a journalist because that seemed an acceptable way to earn a living with words. My mother died when I was forty-two and shortly after that I began to write pieces of fiction and memoir. It took me until my first novel was published, when I was fifty-one, to realize the death of my mother and the birth of my writing were linked – that in losing my mother I had acquired the right to write my own life.

Chapter Five

After Tricia died the thought of what would be involved in clearing the farmhouse was terrifying.

A few years earlier I had viewed a house for sale in which the owner had died of a heart attack only days before and I had been appalled to see bread on the kitchen units that was still in date and the dead owner’s appointments on the calendar for the following week: Coffee with Bernard, 2 o’clock.

Families move at different speeds. Tricia had been dead six months when Dad said, ‘What about doing something wi’ yon house?’ and we knew we couldn’t put it off any longer. At first I thought we’d get a skip, but no, Dad built another enormous bonfire in the orchard – this time away from the telephone wires – and, bit by bit, we ferried generations of possessions onto what was in effect a funeral pyre.

Not knowing what to do with many things with sentimental value, we threw them into a ‘Memory Box’, actually a yellow cardboard box in which my new boots had just arrived.

These were the things we saved:

Tricia’s childhood jewellery: tangled silver chains, little charms and bent and twisted earrings; her drawings and paintings, watercolours of cats and dogs and horses and self-portraits; photographs of Tricia with friends we didn’t know in places we didn’t recognize. I studied her face, scanning her expression for signs of distress – did she want to be there? Was she enjoying herself or was she desperate to be alone, smoking? Was that a false smile? Was she suffering? Was that one of her good days or one of her bad?

We saved stacks of her notebooks and diaries that I couldn’t bear to read – including the notebook that the police officer had removed along with her body. ‘She wrote a lot, didn’t she?’ he said the following day when he returned to take down more details. Elizabeth was angry. We did not know what she’d written in that notebook so why should he? Apparently, though, the book did not shed any light on her thoughts on her last night on this earth – it did not contain a suicide note. We were allowed to have it back after the inquest, except by then it was lost. Incensed they had been so careless with her things, we asked the Coroner’s Office to chase it up until the police found it and hand-delivered it to Dad’s in a sealed envelope to stop him reading it and getting upset.

We saved Tricia’s soft toys. How do you burn a teddy bear you remember from childhood, no matter how filthy? We saved a home-made sheep, a rock-hard badger and a gangly Pink Panther. Who made these? Nobody could remember. It was probably Mum’s mum, Grandma Mary, who took up handicrafts with a passion after her husband, Grandad Ben, died – sublimating her grief in patchwork dogs, hessian dolls and punched leather work.

We saved Tricia’s one-legged Tiny Tears doll called Karen who we found naked except for a bikini drawn on in green felt pen and wrapped in Mum’s old fox fur with its flat nose and glass eye. Karen and the toys were rescued from the farmhouse only to be flung on a rocking chair in a corner of Dad’s house where they remain, described by my teenage daughter, Lara, as ‘that pile of old weird shit’.

We saved sherry glasses – stacks of sherry glasses in styles ranging from the delicately etched of the 1930s to the clunky and chunky of the 1970s – even though we had never drunk sherry except at Christmas. Where had all these sherry glasses come from? Dead great-aunts? Grandma? No one could remember but we took to drinking Harveys Bristol Cream before supper.

I saved a page of doodles I discovered with the words ‘My name is Nina, and I am brilliant and I must not forget it’ written on, surrounded by trees and hearts, shoes and cats. I framed it and hung it on my daughter, Nina’s, wall.

Although many items had been removed in the weeks after Tricia died, there were still plenty of things dangling in the wardrobe. I saved clothes that would never fit me and would never be worn again even if they did but that I remembered Tricia wearing, including the twenty-year-old bridesmaid’s dress she wore at my wedding. We saved a flowery skirt that I turned into a cushion, a dress I turned into a jumper and a jumper I turned into a hat. We saved broken beads to be made into Christmas decorations. We saved her piano certificates. We saved her swimming badges, from 50 metres to bronze lifesaving, which were still attached to her red stripy swimsuit. Going to ‘the baths’ at Lancaster had been a big deal. The first time we went I must have been about seven and expected it to be one big claw-foot bath like we had at home. I wore a swimsuit with polystyrene floats fitted round the waist – a costume rejected by Tricia. I gazed, fascinated, at the sign NO RUNNING, PUSHING, SHOUTING, DUCKING, PETTING, BOMBING, SMOKING with its helpful cartoon illustrations and I clung to the side as Tricia set off on tiptoe, splashing across the shallow end seemingly unconcerned by water lapping at her nostrils. It was similar to the only time we went ice skating. Then I’d gripped the safety rail while Tricia’s game spirit was spotted by a stranger – a middle-aged woman – who led her around the rink. By the end of a torturous hour for me they glided serenely back, side by side with crossed hands, like something off a Victorian Christmas card. Tricia was always braver than me.

Some things were easy to burn: the piles of medication in blister packs, which went straight on the bonfire, as did stacks of appointment letters from the mental-health services. We burned her last packet of fags – the pack of ten with the four missing that we found on the bathroom floor – but by then I regretted we hadn’t put these with her in the coffin. Tobacco had been a good friend to Tricia.

Many things were hard to burn; for instance her socks. Cello cried as he emptied her sock drawer onto the bonfire and watched Dad stopping the balled-up socks from rolling out of the flames with his big stick.

Sometimes we got cavalier. I tossed a toilet bag into the fire without checking carefully enough what was inside, only to discover too late that it contained aerosols and sealed tubes that exploded and sent my father diving for cover behind the giant bamboo.

During the weekends of clearing, the flames burned bright throughout Saturday afternoon and if they began to flag Dad would douse them in diesel and they’d soon be ten feet high again. The bonfire would still be smouldering on Sunday morning which meant we could continue; sofas, mattresses, damp quilts and bedspreads, all the velvet curtains, carpets, lino, on they went.

It felt cleansing and became addictive; you’d find your eyes scanning a room for flammable materials. A battered screen! Dried-flower arrangements! More wool! Let’s drag them out and burn them!

Once the rooms were empty we started pulling off wallpaper that hung loose and damp in places – great lengths of woodchip painted in shiny turquoise and mauve that came away bringing layers of plaster with it. We’d bang the flaking plaster with a brush until it all fell and we had at last got back to a sound surface. We wrenched off sheets of plasterboard that had been used to box in original features in the 1970s, to reveal wallpaper from the 1950s with hand-painted roses and lily of the valley.

To watch dusty, neglected, largely unloved items set alight, burn, smoulder and turn to ashes felt right. It also felt very warm and, despite it being summer when we did the clearing, the heat on my face was comforting and gazing into the heart of a fire consuming my family history was mesmerizing.

As a seven-year-old, I had watched the disposal of my Great-Great-Aunt Alice’s things and been fascinated by the dismantling of a life, fascinated to see someone’s life story being taken apart into its bits and pieces and each one being held up to the light, valued in some way, then kept or discarded.

There were legends about Great-Great-Aunt Alice: she was a suffragette; she founded her own bus company between Manchester and Blackpool; she was a ‘man-hater’ who married a much younger man only to pay for him to go to Australia and never come back. It was said she was so tight with money she reused old stamps. She was a hoarder whose bungalow was only navigable via narrow corridors between the piles of junk. She nearly killed herself by keeping warm with an electric fire placed on the bed because there was nowhere else to put it and which then set the bedding alight; and, as recalled by one uncle, ‘she had a dirty parrot who shit everywhere’.

But you only heard these legends if you asked, because Great-Great-Aunt Alice had no children and so when she died she began to fade fast into history.

Great-Great-Aunt Alice: suffragette, businesswoman and hoarder

I have her photograph on my living-room wall in my gallery of ancestors. The picture dates from around 1914 when she was in her mid-twenties. She is wearing a high-necked Edwardian blouse and two thick gold chains with pendants of amethyst and quartz. She has a cameo brooch pinned on one side and a gold nurse’s-style watch on the other. Her hair is swept up into a chignon and she stares past the camera with a determined expression. She is clearly a woman who amounted to something.

When I was six or seven she was very old and dying and she came to stay for a few weeks with Grandma Mary. Mum and I went upstairs to take her a bowl of prunes on a tray. The air hung heavy in the bedroom where Great-Great-Aunt Alice was a small hump under the bobbly candlewick counterpane. Her little grey head turned as we entered.

She struggled to get her tiny shoulders up onto the pillow so she could taste the prunes in their sticky brown juice. The spoon shook in her hand and clacked against the rim of the bowl and dribbles of juice trickled down her chin. In a loud and forced-cheery voice Mum said, ‘We’ve come to have a look at you,’ which was the usual greeting in our family, but Great-Great-Aunt Alice said nothing; all her fading energy was concentrated on getting the prunes onto the spoon and up into her toothless mouth.

Being so infirm, taking so much effort to raise a spoon to your mouth, and to suck and to swallow, to not be able to talk, to want to eat prunes at all – this looked to me like somewhere between life and death, but nearer to death.

A week or two later we went to Grandma Mary’s for the usual Sunday afternoon visit and Great-Great-Aunt Alice was nowhere to be seen. Instead there were Great-Great-Aunt Alice’s things; boxes and boxes of shoes and handbags and petticoats, so many things that the big farmhouse kitchen was like a jumble sale. I particularly remember the petticoats in satin and silk and watching Tricia and Cousin Elaine clop past wearing one each, lifting them up like Cinderella’s ball gowns as they clattered and wobbled by in Great-Great-Aunt Alice’s shoes. There was a reek of mothballs.

One of my uncles held up a great pair of white bloomers and said, ‘Run them up a flagpole and folks’ll know you’ve surrendered,’ and everybody laughed.

We poked through drawers that had been removed from chests and dressing tables, which must have been brought from Great-Great-Aunt Alice’s bungalow after her death and dumped on Grandma Mary’s kitchen table. They were filled with the usual stuff that accumulates in drawers: dried-out pens, purses with the odd sixpence inside, bottles gummed up with the residue of sticky yellow cologne, tickets for long-forgotten trips, postcards from long-lost friends. In the grime in the corner of one drawer an aunt found a garnet and seed-pearl ring and trilled, ‘Is it finders keepers?’ Grandma, who was standing at the kitchen unit slicing boiled eggs for tea with a plastic and wire contraption, didn’t look round and said, ‘Take what you want.’

I left with a bracelet of coloured stones and an evening bag all silky inside and infused with a lingering scent of a long-ago perfume. I was delighted to own such glamorous things, and, as both the bracelet and the bag were considered rubbish by my mother, I was at liberty to drag them around the farmyard with me until both the bag and the bracelet were broken and lost.

Many years after the disposal of my Great-Great-Aunt’s things I read Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford. In it Miss Matty burns her parents’ love letters.

‘We must burn them, I think,’ said Miss Matty, looking doubtfully at me. ‘No one will care for them when I am gone.’ And one by one she dropped them into the middle of the fire, watching each blaze up, die out, and rise away, in faint, white, ghostly semblance, up the chimney, before she gave another to the same fate.

I ask myself now: is it possible to dispose of a person’s effects with dignity?

Some months after writing this I discussed these memories with my Cousin Mary. She remembered all the stories of Great-Great-Aunt Alice; yes, she did indeed buy her husband a one-way ticket to Australia, writing ‘liar, thief and all that is bad’ on the back of his remaining photograph. And yes she was a suffragette and made money in stocks and shares and in business, and tried to keep warm by putting the electric fire on the bed – and she did set the bed on fire. But here my memory proved faulty. The bed-fire had in fact killed Great-Great-Aunt Alice after a short hospital stay. So who was the tiny grey-haired lady eating prunes whose stuff we had shared out? It turned out to be another unmarried, childless great-great-aunt called Annie. And this underlined for me that after death not only do we disappear and our belongings become scattered, but our stories begin to blend with the stories of others and meld and shapeshift like a flock of murmurating starlings.

A few years after Great-Great-Aunt Alice (or, as it now seems, Annie) died, my Great-Aunty Margaret died too, also leaving no children, so the contents of her seaside bungalow went up for public auction. I had moved away by then and didn’t go and afterwards I asked Mum what had happened to Great-Aunty Margaret’s most prized possession – her silver epergne, an elaborate candelabra centrepiece that she displayed on her sideboard, proudly telling everyone it had once belonged to Rochdale Town Hall. My mother said, ‘She’d polished it so much she’d worn the silver plate off.’ She shrugged. ‘Somebody must have bought it, I suppose.’

Great-Aunty Margaret suffered from dementia and as it progressed she told us the same stories over and over again. The one she recounted most often was how she got up on her twelfth birthday to be told she was never returning to school and there was a job waiting for her in a Rochdale cotton mill. ‘I did cry,’ she repeated. ‘Oh, I did cry.’ She spent the last months of her life in a home. Her upright piano, and the sheet music for ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ and ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’, went to the home with her in the hope she would play for the other residents. On arrival she declared she had never set eyes on that piano before and it most certainly was not hers. She never touched it again.

Great Aunty Margaret left school at 12 to work in the cotton mill

Some of Great-Aunty Margaret’s more personal effects, which in her handwritten, home-made will she had earmarked for particular old friends, were brought to our farm in a black bin liner for my mother to distribute. They included her fur three-quarter-length, her astrakhan coat and her engagement ring – a small flower set with diamonds.

My mother dumped the bag in Gran’s Dairy – I don’t know why, the farmhouse was big enough for umpteen bin bags – and my father mistakenly, but inevitably, dragged it out for the bin men. Within days it was flung in the dustcart and that was the end of Great-Aunty Margaret’s legacy. Mum and Dad made a mad dash to the council tip at Fleetwood to try to retrieve the bag of Great-Aunty Margaret’s treasures but arrived to find a sea of similar black plastic bags stretching to the horizon and realized the furs and diamonds were gone for ever.

As a young woman Great-Aunty Margaret had wanted a family. There was a story that she once thought she was having a baby. She got fat. She made preparations. Unfortunately she stayed pregnant for more than nine months, at which point the phantom baby faded away.

We emptied the farmhouse over many weekends during spring and summer, 2014.

It was filthy, dusty work. I dug through the dead weight of Tricia’s vinyl records and found a Roy Wood album from forty years ago and played it at full blast. ‘Look Thru the Eyes of a Fool’ crackled and slurred and jumped and blurred under the blunt needle and vibrated the stagnant air in the house just a little. As fire was cleansing, so was noise.

I found a load of washing Tricia had done months before still in the machine mouldy and rotting and loaded it straight into a bin bag.

I took photographs to remember the things we burned and to feel I was keeping a part of them: the fusty Disney picture books of Cinderella and Bambi and Alice in Wonderland from the 1970s, the disintegrating 1950s Vogue pattern for evening gloves, the handbook for a 1960s wringer, a 3d pattern for a crocheted hat that would ‘only take one hour to make’, hard-backed books with titles like Ezra the Mormon and The Major’s Candlesticks, rotting, mildewed Sunday-school prizes signed in fading ink and in a formal script ‘for Stuart, for regular attendance, 1934’. From under the stairs we dragged out half-made rag rugs from the 1950s and a romantic print of a Regency couple marked on the back ‘Christmas 1908’.

Growing up surrounded by all this lingering stuff, with the past and the present and the living and the dead tangled and colliding, it’s hardly surprising that as a child I looked out of my bedroom window and glimpsed Grandma Marjorie, dead since 1938, carrying a basket of washing across the back yard.

By taking photographs of what we were removing, I believed I was in some way keeping the spirit of the thing. It was unthinkable that I should forget. What if I suddenly needed to know the exact shade of blue of Grandma Mary’s old beaded evening gown? The one she wore in the 1970s to meet the Queen. Was it sky blue or was it nearer royal blue? Or what if it was important to recall the precise swirling pattern on the sitting-room carpet? The carpet that was being fitted when half our feral cats climbed in the back of the fitter’s van and were driven off and lost for ever.

I took photographs of Dad’s mummified football boots which had hung on the garage wall for seventy years, of the view from every window, of the texture of the brickwork, the rust on the outhouse window locks, of the flaking paint on the barn door, of the weeds sprouting between the cobbles and the ivy coiling round the fence posts. Turning these story fragments and half-memories into photographs meant the past was not completely lost nor the memories obliterated. All these things were part of our lives here and might in some small way explain how that story ended as it did.

Me and Dad, discovering Ezra the Mormon and The Major’s Candlesticks

I snapped away and heard Lara whisper to Cello, ‘Mum’s just taken a photo of the ground.’

If things could be saved – if they weren’t stinking of mould or half-eaten by moths – we sometimes packed whatever it was into a box and dumped it in Dad’s garage to create a whole new problem for another day, saying to ourselves, ‘Well, you never know.’

I framed a certificate I discovered in the sealed-up cupboard halfway up the stairs that still housed Aunty Marjorie’s Sue Barton books, the paint on the cupboard doors finally cracking from top to bottom as I wrenched them fully open. The certificate was from the Ministry of Agriculture’s ‘1944 Victory Churn Contest’ and had been awarded to the ‘farmers and farm labourers of New House Farm’ for increasing the farm’s milk yield by over 10 per cent during the country’s ‘time of need’.

I took tarnished silver spoons home to Scotland and polished them until they shone, only to let them blacken again without using them. I put the headless dressmaker’s dummy, still set to Mum’s exact measurements, to stand vigil in Dad’s spare bedroom. I gathered stacks of photographs of unnamed, unknown people and tried to persuade aunts and cousins to identify them and take them away, largely without success. Some were marked but the markings left more questions than answers; on the back of one black and white photograph of a man in a suit and spectacles and bowler hat who looked like a bank manager, written in Grandma Mary’s hand was ‘Uncle Percy; cut his throat on a park bench’, or another of a woman in a 1930s dress, written in an unknown hand: ‘My mother.’ When I asked around about ‘Uncle Percy’, no one seemed to know.

As Mum had not liked sharing her things, she had been equally unwilling to share information. Family anecdotes were treated like state secrets and any request for details was greeted with tight lips and a Stop mithering or a What do you want to know THAT for? Telling stories was ‘gossiping’, even if the people involved had been dead for a generation – which meant stacks of photographs were left untethered from their stories.

There was a white box of wedding photographs showing my mother and father on the day they married in 1959; my mother beautiful without make-up and in a home-made dress – a lace and duchesse satin creation that could have come from a couture house. A dress I was disappointed as a child to discover she had chopped up to make satin cot quilts for us as babies – a decision that I now see makes perfect sense. In the black and white wedding photographs my father is handsome in a bespoke suit and white carnation and, in some, with what must be a bright red ‘L for Learner’ sign pinned to his back by my mother’s brothers.

As a child I would have revelled in the glamour of these photographs and listened rapt to the details of the day, but those details were never divulged by my mother who kept the pictures out of sight at the bottom of the wardrobe with stacks of wool and material on top. We’d get tantalizing glimpses of the white box but were strictly forbidden to ‘root’. And now it was too late. Now my mother’s memories of the day were lost for ever. My mother wasted an opportunity to talk and to share and it still makes me mad with her, even though she has been dead ten years. What was the point of having these photographs at all if they were to be abandoned to moulder out of sight?

Mum and Dad married in 1959

By contrast my father keeps the brochure for their honeymoon in his desk drawer. He takes out the small blue booklet, Cook’s Motor Coach Tour to the Sunny French and Italian Rivieras, Taking in London, Grenoble, Nice, Monte Carlo, San Remo and Paris, at every opportunity to tell us again about the casino in Monte Carlo and the ‘Paris by Night’ coach tour on the way home. This must have been quite some tour in 1959; the brochure’s instructions hint at the novelty of the trip: ‘It is not practice for hotels to provide toilet soap and it is recommended that you take your own soap and at least one hand towel … Cameras can be taken on the Continent, and films purchased quite easily … As there may be opportunities for bathing you may wish to pack a bathing suit … Sunglasses will add to your comfort … Baths (unless you have booked a room with private bath at a supplementary charge) and afternoon teas are not included.’ Torquay or, God forbid, Blackpool would not have done for my mother, but whenever Dad talked about their glamorous trip she’d respond with a dismissive wave of the hand. Who wants to know about that?

When we were left with only heavy furniture in the farmhouse we called a house clearance cum antique dealer who sent along a pair of rough-looking blokes called Pete and Trev. Pete and Trev pulled up outside with a van already packed, and with no apologies for being two hours late. The things we wanted them to take included the enormous bedroom suite my father’s parents, David and Marjorie, had arrived with in 1925 as newly-weds. This suite was heavyset mahogany elaborately carved with leaves and flowers and smelling of camphor. There were four pieces: a wardrobe with an arched bevelled mirror, a marble-topped washstand, a dressing table and a bedside cupboard with a shelf for a chamber pot.

As Pete and Trev sauntered about the farmhouse their eyes never looked where we pointed but flickered around each room, alighting briefly on everything else. Furniture was touched, smoothed, handled, turned upside down, and pronounced upon with a shaking head. ‘Brown furniture, you can hardly give it away these days,’ said Pete or Trev. ‘It’s all IKEA now.’ Pete or Trev grimaced. ‘A piano? It’d cost me more to take it than to leave it. The last one – I couldn’t give it away – had to get it dropped from a crane to break it up.’ Cupboard doors were opened and shut; drawers were slid in and out, out and in, removed, twizzled round. ‘Where are the drawers for this Georgian chest?’ asked Pete or Trev. Unfortunately the answer was ‘on the bonfire’. ‘Where is the other table from this G Plan nest?’ We looked at each other; maybe our eyes flickered to the window with the view of the bonfire. Nest? Was there another table as ugly as that one? Eventually Pete or Trev brought out a roll of banknotes from a trouser pocket and rapidly peeled off several. ‘Three-fifty and it’s off yer hands.’

There was almost a hysteria by now about finishing this task which had been generations in the making. The decisions we made were hasty and getting hastier because Elizabeth and I lived hundreds of miles apart and so we did the job in bursts at weekends. It felt at times as though we would never get to the end of it. I had the sensation of trying to free myself from a sticky cobweb that clung relentlessly, refusing to let go and entangling me further no matter how hard I grappled.

Not long after Pete or Trev paid us for the bedroom furniture we found a list of wedding presents, handwritten by Marjorie in 1925, headed up ‘Walnut Bedroom Suite – given by Mother and Father’. So it was walnut not mahogany. I felt a guilty stabbing – what were we doing? – before common sense reasserted itself.

As the house became emptier and brighter it seemed physically to lighten and relax. When David and Marjorie’s enormous bedroom suite was finally removed by Pete and Trev ninety years after it arrived, it was as though the house had lost its anchor or had its roots severed. The farmhouse was now empty and echoing and it seemed there was every chance that, unencumbered by our family detritus, I might return to it one day and find it had gone – that it had floated entirely away.

Chapter Six

My sisters and I were born at New House Farm in the sitting room; the same room in which my dad was born thirty-eight years before me; a room otherwise only used on Christmas Day to watch films and eat Quality Street; a room that would one day have Pete and Trev strolling round it talking about pianos and cranes and brown furniture as they weighed up brass pots and pieces of china and searched for marks on the silver.

Me and Elizabeth ‘helping’ Dad mend a puncture around 1966

On the day I was born, Nurse Steele came with her canister of gas and air to deliver me, as she had done three years earlier when Elizabeth arrived and as she would do three years later for the birth of Tricia.

On that occasion Elizabeth and I were not told what was happening in the sitting room directly below our bedroom. We woke one morning to discover our bedroom door so firmly shut it was impossible to open. Was it locked? Were we trapped? We hammered and screamed ‘Help! Help! Mummy! Mummy!’ until Dad wrenched the door open. ‘Sssh!’ An aunt took us downstairs and gave us Chocolate Fingers and milky coffee in front of the kitchen fire to keep us quiet until we were eventually taken into the sitting room for the first sight of our new sister.

We were led through the lobby and the sitting-room door, past the grand piano, until I was on eye level with the bed that my father had brought downstairs the week before for the arrival of this baby. Mum was propped up against the pillows, smiling a little, wearing a crocheted bed jacket with satin ties. Tricia was lying on the counterpane wrapped in a white blanket. I think Mum probably decided not to be cuddling Tricia as we came in for our first look so we wouldn’t be jealous.

Nurse Steele said, ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ and I stared at this red-raw mewling thing moving in slow motion. I looked sidelong at the smiling nurse – was she laughing at me? Why was she saying it was lovely? I felt betrayed. This was not the playful, chubby-cheeked baby I had been promised – the one I could be ‘good’ with and share my toys with; I was doubtful it was even a baby at all. It reminded me of new kittens when you first found them in the barn in the nest; eyes shut and rooting for milk. Nurse Steele gave a tinkling laugh and I looked at the carpet.

Someone had played a dirty trick on me.

Years later Tricia claimed she could remember being born – the violence of it, the darkness, the eventual light. When I told Mum she snorted and rolled her eyes. As if!

She banged her Daily Express, with an expression like Whistler’s mother, and that was the end of it. Perhaps the act of childbirth was below my mother’s dignity and she didn’t want anyone remembering that.

In our family, it seemed sitting rooms were for Christmas, for being born or for dying. This was the first room you saw, and the last.

The first dead person I saw was in 1973 when I was nine years old and I was taken to see my maternal grandad lying in an open coffin in the best sitting room of my grandparents’ farmhouse. We rarely got to see the inside of this room but there was no time today to examine the upright piano or the cabinet of china ornaments – including a china cat about to kill a cowering china mouse – or the eight black and white wedding photographs of my mother and her seven siblings framed and hanging on the wall like a catalogue of wedding styles through the 1950s and 60s.

No, today the settee had been pushed back against the piano to make room for the coffin, which was shiny oak, top of the range, and resting on some kind of stand. Grandad Ben was wearing a white satin shroud and was surrounded by white satin padding. He had died of lung cancer after being ill for only two months. He had rapidly grown thinner and weaker and his cheeks had sunk but nobody had told me he was dying.

His bed had appeared unannounced and unexplained in the living room of my grandparents’ farmhouse where the old sofa used to be – the one we sat on to watch The Golden Shot and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) on a Sunday afternoon while we ate finger rolls with mashed egg and salad cream followed by Great-Aunty Margaret’s jam slice – and he had gathered ever-more bowls and containers around him to cough and spit into; but still nobody told me he was dying.

Illness was frightening; adults whispering and shaking their heads was frightening. Frustrated that he looked worse every week and puzzled when Grandma smiled a little too brightly and said, ‘He did so well!’ when all Grandad had done was walk to the bottom of the yard and back, I asked my mother: ‘When’s Grandad going to get better?’ She was stirring a pan of gravy with a wooden spoon and kept her eyes on it and said, ‘Maybe he won’t.’

Shock trickled from the top of my head to the tips of my toes like a bucket of iced water. I had never considered there were important things grown-ups could not fix.

I wondered if my mother would ever have told me if I hadn’t asked.

When he died my mother asked me and my sisters if we wanted to go and see him. Grandad was six feet tall, a strong farmer with a forceful personality, and now here he was in his coffin looking like a waxwork. We were told his body had been embalmed so he would never change. This, I understood, was because Grandad was a Very Important Person; someone his family looked up to and respected without question. Grandad was a Worshipful Master in the local lodge of the Freemasons; Grandad was a Duchy of Lancaster tenant and had been invited to meet the Queen at St James’s Palace more than once; Grandad had played rugby for the Rochdale Hornets and as a young man had been sparring partner for professional boxer Jock McAvoy, known as the Rochdale Thunderbolt; Grandad was a personal friend of Gracie Fields and on the marble mantelpiece by the television was a postcard from the island of Capri to prove it, curling at the edges and a little singed from when it had drifted into the open fire, but still legibly signed ‘best wishes, Gracie’. Grandad was all-knowing, all-powerful and immortal.

We edged towards the coffin. I could see Grandad’s profile; it was him and yet not him. I wasn’t sure that embalming was such a good idea if it meant he would look like this for ever. His hands lay white and frozen on the shiny satin shroud. They looked different; they looked very clean. A farmer’s hands never look very clean, no matter how much they scrub them with globs of Swarfega. I learned years later when my own father was ill in hospital with the first of his bouts of cancer that if a farmer’s hands are not ingrained with soil he is either dangerously ill or he is already dead.

My mother leaned over the coffin and kissed Grandad’s cheek and I watched, horrified. I’d never seen my mother kiss anyone before, let alone a dead person.

I’d been reluctant to kiss Grandad when he was alive because he and my uncles had a habit of grabbing your face and rubbing their stubbly chins on you. This painful experience was known as a ‘chin pie’ and was supposed to be funny. It certainly made my uncles roar with laughter but it had made me wary. I knew on this occasion Grandad was not going to give me a chin pie but I still didn’t want to kiss him.

Elizabeth, Tricia and I inched nearer the coffin, side by side, halting at a safe distance. Grandad had been a generous man who regularly went to the cash-and-carry to buy sweets in wholesale quantities for his grandchildren and handed them out like Father Christmas every Sunday, yet bellowed at me for switching on the stair light in the farmhouse to find my way to the loo because I thought the turn in the creaking stairs was haunted. Grandad was a man who read Titbits yet disapproved of many things including a child using the word ‘pregnant’ (‘don’t let your grandad hear you saying that word’). Grandad travelled the world with Grandma Mary, including cruising to South Africa, yet I once saw him pluck a partially sucked sweet off my cousin’s jumper, say ‘waste not, want not’, and eat it. I had joined in games where he sat beside a doorway and tried to whack you with a rolled-up newspaper as you ran past, partly excited but mainly terrified.

‘Say goodbye to your grandad,’ my mother said. She started to cry. I watched, frozen.

I’d never seen my mother cry before either.

I learned when Grandad died that certain rituals follow a death; relatives gather together and speak in undertones and drink tea, but as kids my twenty-odd cousins and I had not yet learned to respect these rituals. On the Sunday after Grandad’s death, but before his funeral, we played Blind Man’s Buff along the farmhouse corridor like on any ordinary Sunday; except this time not only were we trying to evade the blindfolded ‘blind man’, we were trying not to touch the sitting-room door because it had dead-Grandad behind it. If one of the younger cousins stumbled against the door an older cousin would chant, ‘You’re haunted! You’re haunted!’ and the younger cousin would start blubbering, whereupon an aunt would poke her head out of the kitchen and hiss, ‘Ssssh! Don’t you know your grandad’s dead?’ as though there was a danger our racket would wake him up.

I wanted to go to Grandad’s funeral but was told, ‘No, and don’t ask again.’ Neither Elizabeth nor Tricia expressed any interest in going. My mother was knocked sideways by the death of her father and she probably thought she had enough on her plate without taking me. I considered this unfair – especially as this was not the first funeral I had been banned from attending.

Five years earlier, when I was four, I’d asked to go to my first funeral when Old Jack died.

Old Jack was our neighbour and looked like a manifestation of God himself – if God ever wore fustian breeches and lived in a red-brick cottage in the middle of Lancashire. He had white hair, a white moustache and a mahogany desk full of chocolate.

We took up his dinner (his midday meal) every day on the tractor the quarter of a mile from our farm. My dad drove and Elizabeth and I bounced along clinging to the tractor cab, struggling to keep the plate straight to stop the gravy and the peas from dribbling into our wellies.

We’d find him sunk in his armchair by the open fire. He wore a jacket and weskit and trousers shiny with age and of an indeterminate colour best described as ‘old’. He had pockets of mint imperials and barley sugars.

He was glad to see us and would greet us with a ‘How do’ and creak out of his chair and root around in his antique desk to find each of us an Aero bar. The desk had shiny black knobs down each side and soft fraying leather on top and a secret drawer. Old Jack showed us how to slide out one of the knobs to open the secret drawer.

Old Jack’s cottage had no running water, no electricity and no gas. It was 1968, and by then his wife had been dead more than thirty years. Old Jack had lived there on his own since his brother Old Jem died of lung cancer in 1962. Old Jem had never smoked but had spent every night huddled over the coal fire in the cottage to keep himself warm. Old Jack had had two brothers and a sister, all unmarried, who had lived with him after his wife died and who themselves then died at seven-year intervals – Agnes was the first to go in 1948. She was a woman with an ‘erratic mind’ who ‘fizzled out somehow or other’, as my father remembers it. Seven years later Bob shot himself with a 12-bore shotgun on the back cobbles of the cottage. Bob was seventy years old, newly retired and unable to face life without his job on the dykes.

My dad had been visiting Old Jack every Sunday evening since the 1940s and for years there had been games of Nap and Pontoon, with Agnes, Bob and Old Jem, playing for pennies; the oil lamp rocking on the table as they excitedly slapped down the cards.

By the time Old Jack died in 1968 we’d been delivering his meals by tractor every day for ten years and we were the closest thing he had to family.

A year or two earlier when Old Jack was well into his eighties, he’d turned up at our farm on his bike with his Last Will and Testament shoved in his weskit pocket. He was leaving the lot to my dad and another neighbour, he said; his tiny cottage, its contents and his ten-acre meadow with his cow in it. To Elizabeth he was leaving his ebony and gold antique chiming clock, to my baby sister Tricia he was leaving his Edwardian sofa, and to me he was leaving the loveliest thing I have ever been given – the beautiful antique writing desk with the shiny black knobs and the secret drawer full of chocolate.

Old Jack died ‘of old age’ in his sleep when he was eighty-six and he was laid out in an open coffin in the cottage’s tiny sitting room. I was four years old and wanted to go and see him.

‘I want to see Old Jack.’

‘No.’

‘I want to see him.’

‘Stop mithering.’

‘What does he look like?’

‘Like he’s asleep. Now stop mithering.’

‘Is he in bed?’

‘No, he’s in a coffin.’

‘What’s a coffin?’

(Sigh.) ‘It’s a box you get buried in. Now that’s enough.’

‘What kind of a box?’

‘Oak with brass handles. It’s a box that’s oak with brass handles.’

I thought about this. A few years later I would learn about oak boxes with brass handles; I would see them on The Dave Allen Show where they were usually balanced on the crossbars of bikes or slithering out of vans and sliding down hills chased by the vicar. But at the age of four I had never seen one and they intrigued me.

‘Can I go to the funeral?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re too young.’

‘Why?’

‘Children don’t go to funerals. Don’t ask again.’

‘Why?’

‘Ask again and you’ll go to bed.’

Dad brought the antique desk from Old Jack’s with the tractor and trailer. He wrapped his long arms round it and staggered into the house with his knees bent. Unlike with Great-Great-Aunt Alice’s bracelet and evening bag, my mother did not consider the desk rubbish. She said, ‘That desk’s mahogany, it’s a Davenport – put it straight in the sitting room.’ That meant I’d only see it on Christmas Day or if somebody was born or if somebody died.

It was not going in my bedroom because it would get ruined. It was too good, my mother said. It was too good to get scribble gouges and felt-pen marks and cup rings on it. The mahogany desk was going in the sitting room and that was that.

Occasionally over the years I would turn the brass knob on the sitting-room door and push the door over the thick carpet and stare at the mahogany desk wedged between the grand piano and Tricia’s Edwardian sofa. It was a long way away; acres away over the swirling turquoise and gold carpet and flanked by tarnished photograph frames and piles of sheet music and china vases that I wasn’t allowed to touch either. It was far, far away – much farther away than it had been in Old Jack’s living room. It was not covered in scribble gouges or felt-pen marks or cup rings. It was not ruined, but its secret drawer was never opened and no one ever stroked its frayed leather top. No, the mahogany desk may not have been ruined but it was dusty and fading and empty of chocolate and so far away it was lost to me.

One way or another there seemed to be a lot of death about as we grew up – Old Jack, Great-Great-Aunt Alice, Grandad, endless farm cats, sickly piglets and occasional calves born dead, which is possibly why I was obsessed with ghost stories – tales of people coming back, people who were dead but not truly gone. I read and reread Aidan Chambers’s Ghost Stories and More Ghost Stories and, when all else failed, my Sunday-school prize, Saints by Request.

One afternoon Wuthering Heights came on the television. Mum said, ‘You might like this, it’s a ghost story.’ I watched, enraptured by Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. The following day Mum went specially to John Menzies in Preston and bought me the book. I was ten years old and sat on the hearthrug doggedly reading it although I did not understand many words and had to skip Joseph and his broad Yorkshire dialect altogether (even though Joseph was basically Gran). Over several evenings I immersed myself in the passion and the brutality, the obsessive revenge, the jealousy and the violence of a story about a girl called Cathy that took place largely in a Northern kitchen. Mum recalled me finishing the book, turning to the front, reading the introduction, asking ‘What’s incest?’ (pronounced in-kest), getting no answer and starting the book again. This was a wild world where life and death were close to each other; where it was better to commune with somebody even if they were dead than not commune with them at all.

Elizabeth, Tricia and I attended a Church of England primary school and we regularly went to Sunday school at the village church. Sunday school mainly consisted of Mr Herbert, the vicar (or ‘parson’ as my father called him), reminiscing about being bombed in Coventry during the Second World War and did not seem to have much to do with God – or at least did not address the interesting questions like did God really look like Old Jack and where, exactly, was heaven.

As a child I did not think to question the existence of God and took comfort in both the idea of a Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild Looking Upon this Little Child, and the vague notion of a heaven – which, I supposed, hovered somewhere or other full of all the dead people and animals I had ever known. At Christmas, God and Father Christmas became rolled into one – a jolly-faced old man who knew exactly what you’d been up to. The Father Christmas version of God was more worrying than normal-God because he could punish you by failing to bring the selection boxes, talc and bath-cube sets and embroidered hankies that appeared under the tree every year.

My Aunty Dorothy gave me a white King James Bible when I was confirmed aged ten which contained photographs of the Holy Land; of barren rocks, entitled In the Wilderness, and silhouettes in a boat upon sparkling water, called Fishermen on the Sea of Galilee – photographs I half-believed were taken in the time of Jesus Christ himself. There was also a ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’ section for me to fill in. I was proud of my Bible and found it considerably more interesting than the Book of Common Prayer I received at the same time. I noticed there was a chapter in the Bible that was never mentioned at school or Sunday school – the Revelation of St John the Divine. I wondered if perhaps the vicar didn’t want to jump ahead and spoil the end of the story.

I asked my mother what it was like when we were dead. She said, ‘Ask Mr Herbert.’ Mr Herbert had white hair that stood on end and waved like a dandelion clock, he wore thick black-rimmed glasses and a dog collar and his hands shook. I once met him on the way back from a trip to the grocer’s. He was carrying a wicker basket in which a lone half-sized tin of spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce rolled forlornly back and forth.

Mr Herbert came to school every Friday to tell us a story from the Bible but he did not engage in casual conversation with the pupils so I did not feel able to ask him anything. Instead I made up my own idea of heaven and decided heaven was a party in the village hall. I pictured the wooden chairs lined up around the edge of the dance floor, George the disc jockey getting his records ready, unseen ladies in the kitchen cutting sandwiches, arranging slices of Battenberg cake and over-diluting orange juice, the coloured lights glowing and the disco ball throwing sparkles hither and thither as it gently rotated – just like before the annual children’s WI Christmas party, in fact. But, this being heaven, it was a party only for the dead. Early doors Old Jack was there by himself but by the end of the 1970s all the empty spaces on the ‘Deaths’ page in my Bible were complete and the party was in full swing.

One night lying in bed in our freezing bedroom I asked Elizabeth whereabouts in the sky this heaven might be and she said, ‘Guess.’ I pointed up into the blackness somewhere over the milking parlour. ‘Nope,’ she said, pointing over the back garden towards the hen cabins, ‘other way! I win! That means you’ve got to get out of bed to put the light out!’

As a child there were a lot of people in my world and many of them were old.

I remember the moment I realized not everyone lived a life like mine, not everyone lived on a farm or even in a village. I was three or four years old and standing on the pavement in the local town waiting for the Whit Monday parade. Crowds two or three deep waited for the marching bands, the floats covered in crêpe paper and the festival queens with their retinues from all the surrounding villages – but I faced away from the road and stared at the toy-town houses behind me. I could tell they were tiny even though my head barely reached the door handles.

These houses were not like farmhouses; their front doors opened onto a pavement not a garden path or a farmyard, they had windowsills that I – somebody who didn’t even live there – could sit on, and they had windowpanes that I could press my forehead against and see right through. I stared harder. Yes, I could definitely see somebody’s ornaments and their settee and their fireplace.

Everybody I knew lived on a farm, usually down a long lane, surrounded by fields and woods and ponds and a yard and a garden and an orchard. Nobody could sit on our windowsills or look through our windows at our ornaments or our settees or our fireplaces.

‘Turn round,’ my mother said. I didn’t. I kept staring. Were these houses for old people, people who couldn’t walk and who sat in armchairs all day, like Old Jack? They couldn’t be for children, surely; not children like me and my sisters and my gaggle of cousins who could run as hard as we liked for as long as we liked and still not reach the neighbours.

I couldn’t believe how unlucky other children were not to have their own farms. All my relations had farms and each family was known by the name of their farm: ‘Sharples are here!’ ‘Crookhey have landed up!’

Each farm was popular for a different reason. ‘Sharples’ had a wood, ‘Crookhey’ had a pony, ‘High House’ had a brook, ‘Hookcliffe’ had a mountain, ‘Throstle Nest’ had a grassed-over gravel pit, ‘New House’ (us) had a great stone barn with the world’s best rope swing and an old hen cabin filled with discarded furniture – tables and chairs riddled with woodworm, cupboards with warped doors that wouldn’t open and then wouldn’t shut again, an old camp bed with creaky springs, and everything coated in dust – which was the best den in the world. Farms were chock-a-block with hiding places and climbing trees and animals and it was easy to escape the adults while you created whatever world you wanted, but the people who lived in these houses, these tiny houses right beside the pavement, apparently all sat together in cramped little spaces, with strangers staring at them through the window.

Despite having so many cousins, my sisters and I were thrown together a lot without the company of other children. I knew I was lucky to have Tricia from very early on.

I was maybe six years old. It was dinner-time (the meal we ate at midday). We had set places at the kitchen table: Dad at the head, me and Tricia with our backs to the lumpy Artex wall, Elizabeth and Mum with their backs to the kitchen fire, Mum near the cooker, and Gran at the bottom. On this day I was upset and left the table – did I ask for permission? I don’t remember – but asking for permission was considered important in our family. Please may I leave the table? Table manners were some of the few rules I remember my parents explicitly teaching us – presumably so other people would think we’d been brought up right.

Don’t put your elbows on the table; Don’t talk with your mouth full; Always put your knife and fork together when you have finished; Never lean in front of other people; Don’t scrape your knife on your plate; God forbid don’t lick your knife; Don’t say ‘God Forbid’; and always chew with your mouth closed.

I was once sent away from the table for laughing.

I can’t remember what upset me on this particular day but I left my place and curled into a ball on the living-room carpet, forehead pressed to knees, crying. I heard Mum and Dad laugh and I looked up. Next to me Tricia – only a toddler at the time – had curled into an identical ball to keep me company. I sat up, my face wet and cold with tears and with bits of dust stuck to it from the carpet. Tricia sat up too and looked at me with her solemn brown eyes. I of course did not know the word ‘empathy’ but I thought: Tricia is here. Tricia is with me. Tricia understands. Tricia is the one who loves me.

Tricia was the most loving and lovable child, so sweet-natured it was easy to take advantage of her. She was cooperative and eager to please – not in a needy way but in a happy way.

Elizabeth and I were good at giving her orders: get this, get that, fetch this, fetch that, go for this, go for that, play this, play that, watch this, watch that. I made her play ‘Schools’ before she knew what a school was and had no idea about bells and desks and lessons, and stared at me baffled as I kept ringing an imaginary bell in her face expecting her to line up for playtime. I made her play ‘Hospitals’ when she was small enough to be crammed into the dolls’ cot and be fed ‘medicine’ of sugar and water. She wasn’t keen on the sugar and water but she wanted to play so much she went along with it. Tricia was always game – we’d realized that when she suddenly stood up and walked at nine months old.

Inevitably, as two’s company and three’s a crowd, Elizabeth and I fought over Tricia and, with me being younger than Elizabeth, I often lost. When all three of us played ‘Houses’ in the old hen cabin, Elizabeth was ‘mother’ in the best cabin with all the best junk furniture and Tricia was her baby while I got to live in the rubbish cabin (the cabin next door filled with logs and chicken wire) and be the nasty neighbour, Mrs Crab-Apple.

Me, Elizabeth and Tricia, centre front, at the WI Christmas party – my idea of heaven

I liked to get Tricia to myself and on Tuesday evenings, when Elizabeth went off in the car with Mum for her piano lesson, Tricia and I had our own game to play: ‘Hiding from the Germans’. This entailed dashing around the farm from one hiding place or vantage point to another – from among the hay bales in the loft to the back of Gran’s Dairy, from behind the dog kennel (a metal barrel on its side) to the top of the great stone cheese presses in the farmyard we sprinted here and there, flinging ourselves onto our bellies, ‘Ssssh! Keep your head down. Keep quiet!’ as we tried to evade capture and spot the enemy before they spotted us. As a rule we were not a film-watching family and nobody bar Mr Herbert, the vicar, talked about the war (although this was only twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War) so I can only think this game stemmed from watching The Guns of Navarone or The Great Escape or something similar in the sitting room with Uncle George one Christmas Day.

The farm provided great reading hideaways – up trees, on roofs, inside a stack of straw bales with a torch, where I’d read and itch and sneeze. I enjoyed finding a hidden place to escape into a book. Unseen among the branches of a tree or high up on a building I’d watch and think and feel safe. I always knew if Dad or Gran were near by the rattle of buckets.

At other times I’d lie on the back lawn staring into the sky at the white vapour trails from Manchester Airport. Sometimes the longing to be on board a flight was so strong it was an out-of-body experience. It didn’t matter where it was going, anywhere was better than here. Second only to flying away was the dream of a road trip. I watched wagon drivers jealously when they visited the farm, imagining the freedom of the road. Sometimes they’d turn up with a girlfriend slumped in the passenger seat looking bored, chewing gum with her bare feet up on the dashboard among the toffee wrappers and under the rabbit’s foot dangling from the rear-view mirror, and I’d know those girls were truly blessed.

Freedom for me meant wearing no shoes. My sisters and I were never bothered by dirt and as we ran about the farm I never wore shoes, just socks, and I could leap from one dry patch to another, from one clean, flat stone to the next, avoiding mucky puddles and nettles and sharp stones. For many years I half-believed I could fly, just a little, if I willed it hard enough. That is the sort of thing I told Tricia; that I could fly and that she could too if she tried hard enough; if she ran fast enough and didn’t breathe and only touched the ground with her very tippy toes she would fly. I can see her face now as she drank it in, solemn-eyed, amazed but believing it, believing every word I said.

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