At 69, I sold my house to travel around the world despite my children’s protests — in Australia, a man invited me to his home for coffee, but when I walked into his living room, I froze.

He asked about my father's hands, because there is a detail in a letter from 1968 about my father mending a clock.

A man asked me questions about my mother for four hours. Nobody has asked me a question about my mother in twenty years, including my own children.

And about three hours in he said, not looking at me: "I used to pick which one of you I'd have been."

And I said what.

And he said: "In the photo. Your brothers. I used to pick one and have a go at being him for a bit."

He is seventy-one years old and he told me that in an ordinary voice, in a front room, with a tray of cold coffee on a stool.

What I have had to take.

And here is mine, and it is not 1974, because I have decided I am not going to flog an eighteen-year-old who was tired and poor and wrong.