My mother, Gloria Violet Owen married David Gye at the Presbytarian Church in Malvern on the 29 March 1957. It was not a match made in heaven.

They had met through David's friend, Johnny Donnelly, and, after a brief and turbulant engagement, they married. The daughter of staunchly Masonic and working class parents (my grandmother was fond of saying 'we were poor but we were decent'), Gloria was young and inexperienced. She gave birth to Craig Robert on the 26th September, 1959. I followed on 14 April, 1962. But the marriage was never very happy. It ended when Gloria filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery.

My parents have always been very careful not to speak of the past. And any attempt to try and write about it in the present is fraught with difficulties. But I think whatever happened between them was coloured by the times they lived in. To be married and having children at an age when I, at the same age, was just starting to experiment with life would have been difficult. What would have seemed scandalous to them were merely rites of passage for my generation.

Do I have to wait for them to die before I can truly bring the past into the present? Is it easier to write about ghosts?