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Mum stayed silent for the longest I had ever known. She didn’t reply to any of my questions. Eventually she told me that Dad had left her. My memory isn’t clear, but I think what she actually said was that Dad had left us.

We drove up to Herefordshire in the middle of a continuing silence. The next few days were like the discovery of a new continent. Every day I would wake up, remember and be amazed.

My mother was incommunicado. Once I caught her wandering around the garden, muttering “… all for the sake of his prick”. This is the only time I can remember her swearing. Usually she said “bother”, “blast” or at most “damn”. It turned out that Dad had left her for someone else. Mum called her his “fancy woman”, a traditional turn of phrase which must have been comforting: she repeated it often.

In the New Year, I left the school and we moved to Herefordshire permanently. We packed up everything into the car and drove. It was on the way that we lost our unsatisfactory cat. She had always mewed and had never really been able or willing to settle. We stopped for a break and she leapt out of the car and vanished into a dark wood. After some time calling, we gave up and drove on.

The Stone House stopped being a holiday cottage and became our home. I never saw the inside of the London house again.

About a year later we drove down to London for the divorce proceedings. Mum coached me to say that I didn’t want to see Dad more than once every three weeks. I was on board with this at the time. A compromise was reached of once every two weeks. New words: “custody”, “access.” “And I believed in British justice,” she said bitterly on the way home.

Access was not that easy, though. Dad used to drive up in the little blue Alfa Romeo that he had bought a year or two before, and that Mum had thought was for taking her out in. One day he came up and Mum refused to hand me over. He stood outside the glass door shouting. Then he stuffed a furious note through the letter box. I wanted to read it but without him seeing. For some reason I had the idea to creep up to it on the floor, like a snake. This did not really work because it was, after all, a glass door. “Davey!” shouted my father helplessly.

Mum refused to take Dad’s money, on the grounds that you could not buy your way out of a promise. About £20,000 was put into a fund for me. Meanwhile, we suddenly became poor.

The house in Herefordshire was in two halves: the Stone House and the Brick House. The Brick House we had never lived in, though you could wander round it. It was sold and a retired couple moved in. They brought suburbia with them: they put in a concrete underground garage and planted hybrid tea roses. This gave my mother some savings, about £60,000. For many years, I was uncertain about exactly how much this meant in real terms: was Mum really poor? How much was £60,000? I wasn’t good at thinking in terms of such sums. At the point of the divorce, she was in her mid-fifties and had not had a paid job for twenty-five years.

The money meant we could not claim benefits but I doubt if Mum would have done that anyway. She must have thought about it, because I remember looking at the yellow paper forms. To get Income Support, you had to have less than £3000 in savings, which she could have done if she had spent her money. But then there would be nothing to hand on to her children.

To save money, she turned the electricity off. We used candles for light in the evening. This did not stop me reading, even though she told me I would hurt my eyes: “Always take care of your eyes, they’re the most precious things you have.” For heating in the cold shire winters, we used paraffin stoves in the rooms. Their smell was like petrol but less oppressive and sweet. For cooking we used the paraffin stove in the kitchen, and the fire in the sitting room. Every day, firewood had to be gathered. We used to go out together to the woods near school or near home, and I would help. We knew to look for dry wood, and enough small sticks for kindling, and for the ash which burns well even when wet. I learned how to light the fire without firelighters: in this and only this way, I was a good boy scout. To get the fire burning well once it was started, one blew through a length of thin plastic tubing. There was an art to it. You had to know where to blow to make yellow flames rush up from orange embers, and to listen for the quiet roar of oxidation. This piece of intermediate technology was so vital that it got a nickname, “puffatube”. It was yellowed by breath and spit and blackened by fire at one end.

All our pans were covered with a black layer of charcoal. What could you cook on the fire? Toast and porridge, sausages and bacon, in the morning. For supper, corned beef hash, made with few tomatoes, juicy on top and blackened underneath, sweet and sharp. It was cheap too, I suppose. Because of this gastronomically underprivileged childhood, I now struggle to enjoy small plate meals in fine restaurants.

Finding ways to make ends meet. For a while, she was a secretary at the school. This didn’t last, and I don’t know why. I doubt that she was an easy employee. Then there was private tuition. She taught French and German, writing out advertisements, putting “MA (Oxon)” after her name. Later I discovered that this was a con, and a middle class in-joke. At Oxford and Cambridge, if you turn up to your college for a big dinner five years after graduating from your bachelor’s, you get a Master’s degree thrown in. (In Private Eye, the Rev. Tony Blair, vicar of Little Blighty, put “MA (Oxon)” after his name.) Mum never charged more than £6 an hour. Sometimes I’d have to come with her, or the pupils would come to us and I’d meet them, kids of my age or a bit more or less. She enjoyed teaching and liked most of the children.

She wrote a few short stories for an Indian magazine, via her friends, though I doubt that made much cash. It was called Debonair, which surely dates it precisely. A couple of issues turned up in our house; as well as articles, they had topless women in them, which I suppose must have been extremely Westernized and shocking. Later, as a teenager, I would rifle through the big basket of newspapers to find them.