They were faces of safety to think of in the nights when my blood pumped so hard in my ears I would sit up and look at the moon sliding across the small high window, rather than put my head on the pillow. Above me on the top bunk my brother slept on, and if I called out he’d laugh at me.

Mum and Dad were out – at the pictures, they said – and I could imagine them in some old wooden hall full of glass cases of stuffed fish, like the library in the town, examining fold-out boards with pictures from magazines pinned there. It didn’t seem much fun, but I thought, one day, when I was grown up, I’d do it, too: go out after dark with my hair piled high, and my face smelling softly of powder, heels tapping as I walked next to a man who wore a suit and shaved his blue chin twice a day. So one of the Nan’s would sit with us and Mum and Dad would be back before morning.

There was the Nan who looked like Dad, and seemed to belong to my cousins. She didn’t like Mum and Mum didn’t like her (I knew that, despite their polite chats over the tea-cups) and I wondered, sometimes, if she didn’t like me, too, because I had eyes like Mum, but she’d still look after me, because she was a Nan.  And there was the one who smelled of butter and Fairy soap, and knew the Latin names of all the flowers in her garden, which sounded funny when she recited them because she came from Gateshead. She had a long plait, dark like my hair at the bottom, growing greyer, until the hair which curled around her face was nearly white. I knew she loved us all equally, me, my brother, and all the cousins on that side. I don’t know how I knew it, because she never had a good word to say to any of us, and the only time I hugged her, she kept her arms by her side, and when I looked at her face, the tears were streaming down it. That Nan had scars on her back, glimpsed sometimes if we caught her in her petticoats, coiling her plait into a bun at the nape of her neck.

The Grandads were opposites, different species. The Grandad belonging to the Nan who looked like Dad had been a soldier in two big wars, and was very damaged, I know that now. He loped everywhere, an upright stride just short of a march, and he ate only once a day and drank endless sweet tea, which did no harm because a German had already knocked all his teeth out. His hands were always busy rolling a cigarette to join the one he kept behind each ear, and the one already burning on his lip. He moved in sifting layers of blue smoke, and although I can recognise his Buckinghamshire accent if I hear it, I only remember one thing he said, once, when he’d watched a war film, with the boy cousins and my brother at his feet.

“But we won, didn’t we Grandad?” Robin said, gazing with pride at the old soldier.

“Nobody ever wins a war, sonny,” said Grandad.

The other Grandad – the one who had no hair, and wore glasses, and belonged to Mum – would take us out in rotation, just one of us, alone, every Saturday, somewhere special for the day. It could be London, to see the lights turned on on the huge Norwegian tree in Trafalgar square, or it could be the other way, down to the sea at Seaford, where they’d had their short honeymoon. He carried our sandwiches in an old gas-mask case, and he smelt of mint and played the piano, his big, graceful hands stroking the music out of the keys as I watched and learned. He was a domesticated figure, when I knew him, but had once been more lively: playing in jazz clubs, and fighting Blackshirts, before he made an honest woman of a girl from Gateshead, and had to keep himself safe for his daughters.

Mum and Dad were together when they were sixteen, which I thought was how it should be. They kissed in the kitchen, and if I came downstairs at night I might find them dancing slowly in the little front room with the orange walls and the gas fire. We weren’t welcome at night, although they belonged to us by day. Mum was the prettiest twenty-five year old when I knew her, and Dad was the handsomest Dad. She was always slightly hysterical, he was always slightly absent-minded, they were so humble for themselves, and so proud of us: and there has not been a single thought, or feeling, or action which I have taken, in all my life, which hasn’t in some way been because of them.

Their time alone was precious, because their little flat was always full of younger sisters, and their boyfriends and then cousins, my cousins, people who look like me and share my genes, and took part in terrible family rows, and mattered greatly – but I don’t know where they are, now. They own my past, and I own theirs. I would like them to share some of the future, but I don’t know how to arrange that.

It’s far more peaceful, now we’ve all dispersed, but I still look for them sometimes in the empty spaces. I know I am far poorer, now, that we ever were, and so I’m often afraid, and I long for my family, then. Or is it that I long to be as I was when they were faces of safety to think of in the nights when my blood pumped so hard in my ears I would sit up and look at the moon sliding across the small high window, rather than put my head on the pillow?