I remember first the curve of a grassy hill plummeting into the sea...

I was born in Yorkshire, in Saltburn, by the North Sea.
Six years before, the man who would become my father had been invalided out
of the Royal Navy, his stomach ulcerated and his spirit broken.

He was a working class boy who had enlisted at the age of sixteen.
On the back of a photograph of him with his fellow matelots
on board HMS Hood a proud battleship of the Mediterranean Fleet, he declares romantically:
"Now my schooldays are over, the work begins in plenty."

But that was in 1938. He did not know then that within three years
he would be escorting convoys in a corvette across the icy Atlantic
or that, eventually, he would find himself in the crew of a small landing craft
foundering under heavy fire as it ferried troops to the landings in Salerno.

He never recovered from the loss of his naval career.
It had been a way of cheating his class destiny.
But now he would return to the factory and the steel mill.

I have been told my mother was from the south.
Why her family made their way north I do not know.
But her manners would always mark her as an alien in that rough
industrial terrain. She would always yearn for something better.

They met and married and settled by the blue-green sea.
They had one son and then another.

One day they moved inland to a drab, grey town.
They bought a semi-detached house on an embankment
overlooking a busy main road.
Just opposite ran a railway line which traversed a deep stone bridge.
Beyond the bridge lay rows of terraces and beyond them loomed
the towers and chimneys of the steelworks and chemical refineries
discharging fire into a polluted sky.

He found a job as a signalman on the railways.
Then he became a process worker at the refinery.
Day after day he would ride his bicycle to work and back.
She stayed at home and looked after the children.
Sometimes she would have her friends to tea.

At the rear of their house there was a lane.
In one direction it led past a wasteland
pitted with derelict air raid shelters
and, finally, to a row of slum terraces.

Just beyond their back gate, in the opposite direction,
the lane meandered past much finer houses than hers
with large well-kept gardens the like of which she could never hope to own.
In one of them lived a young man in his twenties.

They became lovers.