If I didn’t have any of this life, it was taken from me, I would go out and find a proper job. I’d make a very good cleaner – I wouldn’t want to be a nanny because that would be too much like hard work – but I’d be a very good domestic, a very good housekeeper. I love making things tidy.

Of course, I’m happy doing what I’m doing at the moment, but Phil and I often talk about what we’ll do when we stop. There is so much life to live, and so many things I want to do while I’m still young enough, while I still have the energy. In the summer I often wake before the alarm. The dawn creeps in through the curtains and I lie, listening to the birds, dozing and thinking. This is my only quiet time of the day, and it doesn’t last long.

‘Fern, it’s half past five.’

The sound of Phil’s voice, muffed by the pillow, makes me laugh. How does he always know it’s time to get up before I do?

‘Do you want a cuppa?’

A grunt. I’ll take that as a maybe and give myself ten minutes more. Phil’s been my husband now for seven years, eleven months and four days but he never ceases to surprise me, and – in spite of his pillow talk about pigs and hams – he’s as romantic now as when we first met.

‘I’d like to renew our vows every five years,’ he said, the day of our wedding, and I said, ‘How lovely. Yes, please!’ So we got to five years, but it just went by the by. It was no big deal, it was like, ‘Ah – we didn’t quite get that organized.’ Then yesterday, out of the blue, he said, ‘Let’s do it now – and in fact I’ve already spoken to the vicar.’ He’d set it all up: eight years, minus one day, to the minute – midday, 23 May 2008 – at St Michael and All Angels in Hughenden Valley, which we’d got to know as it’s the church nearest the children’s school. They go there for their little ceremonies, nativity plays and so on, and the vicar baptized Winnie and he’s a very nice man. So in just over three weeks, for the first time in my life, I’m going to be saying my vows in church. It will be completely private. Just us, and the children. No one else.

I remember hearing Bette Midler talking about her husband of many years, and she said, ‘As much as I love him, I’m not always in love with him!’ And it does go like phases of the moon. But I will never take Phil for granted. I’ve been through too much for that. There have been times when I haven’t wanted to live another day, when just getting through the hours was more daunting than anything I would ever face again. And the shadow of that fear, that the darkness will return, never really leaves you. It’s there to remind you never to waste a moment, never to lose sight of the joy.

Slipping out of bed, I pull on my dressing-gown, go downstairs to put the kettle on and let out the hens. We have two: Sam and Ella – wittily named by the producer who thought they’d be perfect company for Edwina Currie during her stint on the studio roof last September.

A few mornings ago I saw Mr Fox slink away as I opened the back door. He’d obviously been eyeing up their ladyships. Phil is all for sorting out the ginger gentleman himself, but I’ve put my foot down. No guns in the garden. No exceptions. He has a whole wood where he can blast away to his heart’s content, and farmer friends are always imploring him to sort out the foxes and rabbits and even deer who create havoc on their land.

It’s going to be a glorious day. Spring is definitely here and it’s hard to imagine that the blue sky will ever darken. I am so incredibly lucky, leading this idyllic existence, a job in a million, healthy and happy children, a husband who loves me just as I am, and who regularly reminds me of what he promised nearly eight years ago on our way to the register office: ‘I’ll always look after you,’ he said. The night before we married I’d been incredibly jittery, thinking even then that it wouldn’t happen after all. How did he know, I wonder, just how much that meant to me? My life is full of ghosts, and it is only now, looking back from this place of safety, that I can finally lay them to rest.

The sun tips the trees across the field, and the dew seeps between my toes as I pad back to the kitchen. I’ll wear something summery, I decide. A pair of white leggings, and a silky bit of Kate Moss from Top Shop that I bought on-line. (I love internet shopping.) Which reminds me, I’ll have to think about what to wear for the ceremony …

I bring in the milk – six pints a day – in time to see the silver Mercedes come glinting up the track on the dot of six thirty. Tony has been driving me to and from ITV’s London Studios on the South Bank for the last ten years and, rain, shine, hail or snow, I could set the clock by him. Once I’ve heard his tyres on the gravel, I take two mugs of tea upstairs for my boys – an excuse, really, to give them a hug and ruffle their hair, and whether they like it or not, I’ll be doing it when they’re grown men. As for my girls, Goosey and Miss Mouse, I kiss their sweet heads and let them sleep on.

Me and Mr Holly

1. Beginners, Act One, Please

In 1957, the year I was born, my father made his third film, ironically named The Birthday Present, with a very young Sylvia Syms as his leading lady. He was thirty-three and it was his first starring role. Tony Britton was on the way up. The previous year he had made Loser Takes All with Rossano Brazzi. Unusually for a British film of the period, it was shot entirely on location in Monte Carlo. My mother didn’t go with him. On his return he went straight into the West End, playing the romantic lead in Gigi, opposite Leslie Caron. One way and another he was around less and less. In the early days, when Dada’s career was just beginning, my parents had been inseparable, living in a succession of theatrical digs and longer-term lets, but once theatre gave way to cinema – he was under contract to British Lion Films – a stable home took priority, my sister Cherry then coming up for eight.

Renting the top floor of my grandmother’s house in Ealing must have seemed the perfect solution: close to the West End, not far from the studios and company for my mother when Dada was away, not to mention schools and cousins for Cherry. It was while they were living in Ealing that I came along. (A breech delivery and I was two weeks late.) But within a few months, our little family had moved, my father’s film-star status demanding something rather grander than a rented attic flat owned by his mother-in-law.

In the post-war years, film studios clustered in west London like mushrooms, and the names, even now, evoke nostalgia for the glory days of British cinema: Ealing, Teddington, Shepperton, Denham, Pinewood and Elstree. Gerrards Cross, in Buckinghamshire, was equidistant between Denham and Pinewood and the address of choice for directors and actors on the up, and we were soon ensconced in the first home I can really remember. ‘Steeple’, white-painted stucco enlivened with blackened timbers, dated from the twenties and boasted latticed windows and Gothic gables. It sat on a large triangular plot, a steeply sloping peninsula between two roads that joined at the bottom.

The garden had once been an orchard, and each autumn we had more apples, plums and pears than Mummy knew what to do with. There was even a mulberry tree, laden with sweet, sticky fruit in the summer, whose leaves we would strip from their branches for a lady who had silkworms. She gave me a cocoon, I remember, which I took into school for ‘show and tell’, and the class all stood around and marvelled as the gossamer thread unwound, unbroken, seemingly for ever.

With its four bedrooms, french windows, wall-to-wall parquet and oak panelling, Steeple was the ultimate in home-counties chic. ‘Substantial’ and ‘characterful’ is how an estate agent would probably describe it now.

My first clear memory is of being propped in my pram while my mother did things in the garden. There’s an old photo of exactly this situation, complete with my bear Mr Holly, so perhaps the memory is only borrowed. Other memories lead on from that one: staring at the world upside down through my legs, the smell of new-mown grass, my mother bent double in the flowerbed weeding, my big sister teaching me how to roly-poly down the lawn.

The corner of memory set aside for my father, however, is empty. A complete blank. He did live at Steeple from time to time, my mother assures me, so I must believe her, but I have no memory of it. There were dinner parties, she says: Bob Monkhouse and his wife were among their friends; the boxer Freddy Mills was Cherry’s godfather. Mummy loved entertaining and did it brilliantly – she always has done. Our neighbours seemed all to be witty and eccentric. I remember one couple who drove an open-top vintage Bentley, their Irish wolfhounds lording it in the back complete with goggles.

After nine difficult and sometimes rocky years of uncertainty and little money, this house and the life that went with it were the least my mother deserved. I think she hoped that moving into their own home, with its sprawling garden, bordered by thick, high hedges, would mark a fresh start, especially with the new addition to the family. It was not to be. My father was handsome and talented, and was now moving in a world far removed from post-war Weston-super-Mare, where he and my mother had first met and fallen in love one sultry summer night, the sound of the sea in their ears.

It was June 1947, and my father, soon to be demobbed, had been persuaded to wear his uniform one last time to escort Weston-super-Mare’s newly elected Rose Queen to a gala dinner at the end of the pier – the pier which has only recently been destroyed by fire. His parents had moved to Weston from Birmingham at the outbreak of war, when he was about fifteen.

The Britton family had once been well-to-do, with a mansion in Aston, Birmingham, complete with servants, chauffeur-driven cars and eleven children. They were nineteenth-century industrialists and, in classic style, the money came from a brass foundry. In addition to manufacturing machinery, they made die-cast replica cars, and my great-grandfather patented the Britton bicycle pump. The family fortunes never recovered from the slump that followed the First World War. By the late thirties my grandfather Edward Britton – who served as an infantry officer at the Somme – was employed as a travelling salesman for Oxo and Fray Bentos.

I have very little memory of Prampa, as we called him, from my childhood – I only really got to know him later in life – but he was a jolly man, a former publican. He had once run a pub in Edgbaston, which was where my father was born. My paternal grandmother, Doris Jones, had been working in a theatre box office when they met. That would seem to be the only theatrical connection as far as my father’s future career was concerned, although there was an aunt – another of the eleven children – who it’s claimed had a wonderful singing voice but whose dream of going on the stage remained unfulfilled as she was considered ‘too ugly’ to make the grade – the tyranny of the beauty police operating even in the twenties. I knew none of this then. It wasn’t until 1977 when my father was surprised by Eamonn Andrews brandishing a large red book and intoning, ‘This is your life,’ that the picture of this other family began to emerge from the developing tray. Many years later when This Morning ran a feature on family trees, I took the opportunity to delve a little deeper.

My father remained a glamorous if shadowy presence throughout my childhood. There were no pictures of him in the house. I only knew what he looked like because I’d seen him on television when I would wave to him madly. I understood enough about acting to know that he couldn’t wave back, but obviously he could see me, just as I could see Mummy when we did plays at school.

One afternoon in midsummer, when I must have been about four, I remember very clearly being put down for an afternoon rest and informing Johnson – the teddy who had displaced Mr Holly in my affections, and I still have – that I was ‘too old for an afternoon sleep’. It was one of those brilliant summer days that childhood memory is filled with, and I wanted to be outside in the garden playing. Although the curtains were drawn the window was open, and it wasn’t long before I heard voices. I got up, stood on a chair and peered out. There, sitting on the swing seat was my mother, my sister and a man. Instantly I knew who it was: Dada! Mummy must have thought I was asleep and didn’t want to disturb me. He was there, it turned out, not to see me, but to take Cherry away on holiday – she would then have been about thirteen – and my mother hadn’t wanted me to know what was happening, fearing – rightly – that I would feel left out.

I don’t know why he didn’t keep in touch. Maybe he felt he had forfeited the right to interfere. Maybe my mother wanted to keep me to herself. But from his perspective, while he barely knew me, Cherry had been his golden girl. It must have been hard for him not to watch her grow up. The journalist in me would love to know what happened, but as a daughter I have no wish to stir up ancient hurts. What good would it do? Parents have a right to keep their private lives private. And I love them both.

Dada’s departure so soon after my birth hit my sister much harder than it did me. Cherry knew what it was to have a father. They had lived as a proper family for eight and a half years before I came along. She still remembers the starry 1954 season in Stratford, and the house they rented at 61 Waterside. She went to school there with Anthony Quayle’s daughter. Laurence Harvey bought her a pair of red slip-on shoes after she was mocked for only having brown sandals. Margaret Leighton would drop in for tea and a chat, and there were the two Australian actors who always made Mummy laugh, Keith Michell and Leo McKern.

For me it was different. To all intents and purposes I never had a father, or the life that went with it. Divorce was rare in those days. School friends might have had fathers they rarely saw – bankers who worked in the city, or film directors away on location for long periods of time – but at least they were a presence in the house. Their coats would be hanging in the hall. Their shoes would be by the door. There’d be a toothbrush and a tooth-mug in the bathroom. I didn’t even know what fathers did. It came as a great shock later to discover that men washed their hair! I mean, how girly! They had so little of it, what was the point? Even odder, they didn’t shave under their arms, which, given they all had razors, struck me as ridiculous.

If I lacked stories about my father’s family, my mother’s made up for it. They were positively exotic. Great-grandfather Hawkins had been a clergyman, the rector of Holy Trinity parish church in Stroud, Gloucestershire – later to retire to Bristol as a canon of the cathedral there. They were obviously a clever lot. Gerald, my grandfather, read Classics at Oxford. When war broke out in 1914 he volunteered, went to France and was badly wounded, though where or how I don’t know. It was while he was recuperating back in England that he met the woman he would marry, my grandmother Winifred Carter Fitzgerald, known as Beryl. It’s said that she had originally been engaged to his older brother who had been killed in the war. For whatever reason, even though my great-grandfather conducted the marriage himself, it’s probable that the Church of England vicar didn’t relish his son marrying an Irish temptress called Fitzgerald who wore red lipstick. Or perhaps they’d heard rumours about an illegitimate child. As it was, immediately after the wedding the newlyweds left for Penang, Gerald taking up a post in the Malayan Civil Service.

My grandmother appears unlikely casting as a colonial wife. From my own knowledge she was a spinner of tall stories. She claimed, for example, to have been a spy during the First World War, regaling us with tales of being landed on the coast of France by submarine, a courier of top-secret messages. A secret that she never divulged in her lifetime, however, lay closer to home. She’d had a child out of wedlock, whom she’d given up for adoption. The first we knew of his existence was in 1980. I was working in Plymouth for Westward Television, and a letter arrived addressed to me, care of the studios. Was I the daughter of Ruth Hawkins, the stranger wrote, who had married Tony Britton? If so, then he was my uncle, as he was Ruth’s half-brother, the child Beryl had had before she married Gerald.

His name, he said, was John Cass, the surname being that of his adoptive parents. He had kept in touch with his mother, at least for a time, meeting up with her for a few days whenever she returned to England. It was an extraordinary story and yet something about it seemed to make sense. Nana having died fifteen years earlier, I asked Mr Cass to send me evidence of his claim before I broached this inevitably painful subject with my mother, his half-sister. He did: his birth certificate and letters from Nana herself soon followed, sad little notes to her son and his adoptive mother (perhaps only fostering him at the beginning), enclosing money and asking how her firstborn was keeping. He also sent photographs and even I could see the family resemblance. When my mother finally met him, she said he was definitely a Hawkins. He himself never knew who his father was, Nana having so brilliantly covered her tracks. But the general consensus was that he was probably the son of her first love, Gerald’s brother, who had been killed at the front.

In the meantime, in Penang, legitimate children had been born. First to arrive was my uncle Paul in 1919, followed by Ruth, my mother, in 1924; Peter was born in 1929 in Kuala Lumpur. Grandpop, as we called him, was eccentric even then, my mother and her brothers being brought up to speak nothing but Malay, which would prove a stumbling block when they returned to England. To this day my mother is known as Adek (pronounced ‘Addy’), Malay for ‘baby’.

When they were five and ten respectively, the two elder Hawkins children left the Far East, ending up – for some unknown reason – in Port Isaac on the north Cornish coast. It proved a complete disaster. Speaking little or no English, and wandering round barefoot, they were little more than savages, as far as the head teacher of the little school was concerned, and were soon expelled as unteachable. Next stop Eastbourne, where they had more luck, boarded out with a kindly and God-fearing couple called Mr and Mrs Skallen who ran a school overlooking the sea. My mother remembers her father’s last words at the front gate, ‘Goodbye, old thing, see you soon.’ She didn’t catch sight of either parent again for four years.

When they did eventually return on leave in 1934, Beryl didn’t recognize her daughter, by then ten years old. Further separation, a doctor told her, would have a devastating effect on her children, particularly Paul. She was advised not to return to Malaya. If she did, he said, she might not have a son to come back to. So, when Gerald set off on the six-weeks-long passage back to Malaya, Beryl stayed in England, buying a small house in Weston-super-Mare (60 Chelswood Avenue), which she named Segamat after a region in Malaya famous for its fruit. The sea air would be good for Paul’s health, it was decided, and the two eldest could go to the local grammar school. Adek, meanwhile, took on the job of teaching her little brother English.

There was another reason for the choice of Weston. It was close to Bristol, where Beryl’s father-in-law was now a canon at the cathedral. Any notion that proximity to her husband’s family might make life easier, however, proved wishful thinking. Once a year the Canon and his daughter would make the twenty-mile journey, staying at a smart hotel, and Beryl would invite them to Segamat to tea, and that was that. No one was really surprised. During their four-year stay in Eastbourne, Paul and Adek had never once been to stay with their grandfather, nor had he even visited them. As my mother now says: ‘They didn’t want to know.’ Her paternal grandparents – those pillars of the Anglican church – considered their son’s children ‘mongrels’: they didn’t have the Hawkins blue eyes, Paul, Adek and Peter having inherited their Irish mother’s (lesser) brown ones.

When war eventually broke out, Adek was sixteen. Twenty was the call-up age for women, and seventeen the earliest you could volunteer. In 1941, as soon as she could, she joined the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), as the women’s branch of the army was known. She spent the next four years working on ‘heavy ack-ack’ – anti-aircraft artillery, plotting enemy aircraft trajectories – stationed in Hull, Bristol, Salisbury, Sheffield and London, rising to sergeant. They were, she says now, the best years of her life, and on 10 August 1945 she took part in the Victory Parade from the Cenotaph down the Mall to Buckingham Palace.

Her brother Paul, meanwhile, had joined the air force, learning to fly Lancaster bombers in Florida, before being posted to Bomber Command at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire. He did two tours of duty, equating to sixty operational sorties as a pilot sergeant, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. Like everyone in my mother’s family, he was exceptionally tall and had been turned down for flying Spitfires because of his height.

Uncle Paul was undoubtedly the most important man in my life when I was growing up. Unassuming, generous to a fault, he was a great bear of a man, a gentle giant, and I adored him. When I asked him why he had wanted to be a Spitfire pilot he replied, ‘Well, if I was shot down, I’d be the only one killed, but in a Lancaster you’ve got seven crew to think about.’

There had been no word from their father, Gerald, since 1942 when the Japanese had taken Singapore. He had been captured and was held in Changi camp – not where the notorious prison now stands but in a former British Army barracks on the site of an old rubber plantation. Beryl wrote to him weekly but, during the four years of his captivity, only one postcard got through, from his daughter, my mother.

From what is known of conditions at Changi – my grandfather had all his fingernails removed, for example – it’s possible to understand how nothing could ever be the same again for him. As someone with an education he suffered terribly, yet he was also able to help fellow internees survive. When the war finally ended, he returned to England – and Weston – a very different man. He couldn’t stand the food or the climate, he said, and was going back to Malaya. He nurtured no thought that Beryl should go with him.

‘We’re not compatible,’ he told his wife.

‘No, we’re not,’ she agreed. It was as simple as that.

I met him years later, and to an eleven-year-old girl he presented an extraordinary figure – seated in a suburban sitting room wearing only sandals and a loincloth in the middle of an English winter, looking like Gandhi’s taller brother. The University of Malaya in Singapore now houses his extensive library, which includes sections on wildlife and trees as well as politics, public administration, education and social sciences. He spoke seven languages, including Greek, Latin, Malay and Mandarin, and in 1953 wrote the definitive work on the country’s history, leading up to independence in 1957, of which he was a staunch supporter. It is there he is buried.

Once demobbed, choices for a young woman like Adek Hawkins were thin on the ground. It was either ‘factory, laundry, nursing or prison service,’ she remembers. Being unconventional even then, she opted for the prison service but was turned down as ‘not being mentally suitable’. ‘They said I’d be helping them escape!’ Eventually she settled on a job in Clarks’ shoe factory in Street, about thirty miles away, where she found herself billeted in a Nissen hut. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I thought, I’ve had four years in a Nissen hut, now the peace has come I’m still in a Nissen hut!’

But not for long. Now that Beryl was without support, she sold the house they’d lived in throughout the war and bought a small hotel on the seafront – St Bridge’s – overlooking Sand Bay, her plan being to run it as a family concern.

Rationing and post-war austerity had kicked in with a vengeance and what better way to cheer the population up than a bit of escapist nonsense? Weston’s Rose Queen was not a beauty competition in the swimsuit-parade sense, it was to find the most beautiful girl in Somerset and was sponsored by British-Gaumont, owners of the Odeon chain of cinemas, who would then use the footage in their newsreels.

With a couple of friends Adek decided to enter ‘just for a laugh’. While the other two failed to get beyond the first round, my mother made it through to the last fifteen. The finalists were then filmed walking gracefully around the municipal gardens sniffing roses, wearing nothing more revealing than an evening dress with never a hint of cleavage. The key word, she remembers, was ‘demure’. To her intense surprise she came second. My father played no part in the selection procedure. As an up-and-coming local celebrity, already making a name for himself as an amateur actor, he’d simply been comandeered to escort the winner, sitting beside her at the gala dinner which was held at the end of Weston’s famous pier. The Rose Queen’s attendant, however, proved far more alluring to him than the Rose Queen herself.

‘Aren’t you going to drink your champagne?’ he asked the young woman sitting opposite.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Right. You won’t mind if I have it, then.’

In spite of First Lieutenant Britton’s officer’s uniform, former gunner Sergeant Hawkins was not impressed. Although attached to the Royal Artillery since 1942, he hadn’t seen active service (the first question she’d asked) while her brother had risked his life night after night over Europe.

‘Tony hadn’t even got his knees brown,’ as she puts it. Then he asked her to dance.

‘I think you’d better ask her first,’ she said, nodding towards the Rose Queen. He shrugged, got up and came round to my mother’s side of the table. He was handsome and fun. They lived within cycling distance of each other, were the same age. They had performing in common: Adek had done her share of entertaining in the army, from impromptu concert parties in the Naafi, right up to three-act plays when she was stationed in Salisbury. Before long the die was cast.

At this juncture my father hadn’t yet made the break into professional theatre, but Weston’s amateur dramatic societies were better than most and Tony Britton was beginning to get good notices in the Bristol press. His first professional engagement was as an acting assistant stage manager at the Manchester Library Theatre, and it was while he was there that he and Adek married. His first London engagement was at the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, which would later become important in my life. Then came a season closer to home at the Bristol Old Vic, followed by the Gate Theatre in Dublin. Finally, in 1952, came the big break: being cast as Rameses in the West End revival of Christopher Fry’s The Firstborn. In Edinburgh he was seen in The Player King by Glyn Byam Shaw, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. My father stayed in Stratford-upon-Avon for two seasons cast in major roles, including Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, and Cassio in Othello, and then came the contract with British Lion.

By the time I was born, on 17 July 1957, Nana had sold the hotel in Weston and bought a large house in Denbigh Road, Ealing, west London. Uncle Paul – now working for the Post Office – had married his WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) sweetheart and, with their two children, bought another house in the same street, also with plans to let: they would live on the ground floor themselves and let the top. Whatever the tensions in my young life, I remember those two houses as places of warmth and love. Just the smell that hit you as you walked through the front door was enough, the wood darkened by years of cigarette smoke.

To have held her little family together without a husband, not knowing whether he was alive or dead, demanded a special kind of personality, and my grandmother certainly had it. During her colonial years she had learnt to play contract bridge to what must have been a very high standard. As a way of making money, she’d go on cruises, earning enough through her winnings to pay her way and then some. Much depended on creating the right impression, in other words gentle deception, to which end she’d take us with her: a little old granny, travelling with her granddaughters and their mother, was unlikely to set off warning bells. She would happily tell people that she was eighty when in fact she was twenty years younger, anything to get a slight advantage.

I have picture-postcard memories of our ports of call – Naples, Casablanca and Capri. These were the days of severe money restrictions and I remember on one occasion queuing in Southampton’s vast Customs hall, having just disembarked from some great ocean liner. Nana was trying to smuggle through a musical box in which she’d hidden the cash she’d made playing cards, and her plan was simple. We were to stand in different lines and, at the appropriate moment, Nana would ‘faint’. Mummy, Cherry and I would then rush to her side with cries of ‘My poor mother!’ and ‘Poor Nana!’ In the ensuing mêlée, we would all be waved through.

My grandmother was a woman of many talents. Knowing that there was always a fancy-dress competition on board (with a substantial cash prize), Nana would come prepared, having already made the outfits back in Ealing. One year Cherry went as half-bride/half-groom, with her costume sliced down the middle. Another time she was a mermaid. As for me, I remember wearing a frilly dress, my face white with huge eyelashes painted on my cheeks and my head encased in cardboard: a dolly in a box. Favourite of all was when Nana and Mummy went as Siamese twins, Nana having made a huge pair of trousers and a jacket – they took one side each. Naturally you were supposed to conjure your costumes from what little was available on the ship, but Nana contended that with no written rule to that effect, no one could stop her.

During the build-up to the cruise, costumes would be stored under the rug in front of the fire in her sitting room, to keep them flat. I have an enduring memory of lazy Saturday afternoons lying on the carpet, going through Nana’s button box, while she stitched and snipped, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth – so placed, she told me, to avoid the smoke getting into her eyes. She and I shared a passion for wrestling, and in the corner of the room, the black-and-white television had us both transfixed as we shouted for Mick McManus – ‘the man you love to hate’.

I don’t think I ever saw my grandmother without a cigarette except when she was eating. She would smoke each one through to the bitter end, the paper adhering to her red lipstick and the ash remaining in place, even while she talked, growing longer and longer until I was completely mesmerized. She always smoked the same brand, Kensitas, and my big cousin Michael and I would regularly be despatched to the tobacconist for supplies. By the time I knew her, Nana was comparatively old but she had clearly been very beautiful and still carried herself as women do when they know what it is to be the belle of the ball. Even though my mother is now well over eighty, she has this quality and always will. It’s there in photographs of the time: tall and willowy, jet-black hair caught in a bun at the nape of her neck, she might easily have been a Vogue model as captured by Cecil Beaton. She had the look of Kay Kendall, timeless elegance, with an hour-glass figure that was made for the small-waisted, wide-skirted look of the fifties, and skin like porcelain. She and my father must have cut quite a dash – they made an incredibly glamorous couple – and it’s no surprise that he went after her. Just a sadness that they couldn’t stay together.