In which my grandfather plays an inscrutable hand of cards, stokes engines on Channel Islands paddle steamers until the age of 65, smokes a lot of Capstan Full Strength cigarettes and entrances a small boy by constructing a fully-rigged ship in a bottle

(contains some language unsuitable for younger children)   We would not go hungry. We would be comforted. We were to be protected from preventable disease. We were to aspire. We were to have knowledge and then to know even more, right out to the very boundaries if we wished.

  Vivid, all around her for my mother. It was the lived present. The panorama and the spectacle of war, the defiant rhetoric of Winston Churchill. The huge, shared purpose. The horrors, the moments when the restraint slipped. The persistent and recurring memories. All in the past for me. Before my birth, before my life. Read the full article…