DEFINING memories
Perhaps the first mystery that I encountered as a child began at the time of my father’s death when I was six years old. He had been ill for some years, but within weeks of his funeral, my mother had suddenly flung our suitcases on the bed and told me ‘we are getting out of here’ – ‘here’ being the seaside town of Southport where I’d been born. It seemed that were now off to see a much more exciting world.
Within days we were in New York, and then a motel in the Kill Devil Hills of North Carolina, and soon my BOAC Junior Jet club log book, that the pilots would kindly sign for me on each flight, was filled with exotic names: Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo, Tahiti…. But the big question only grew in my mind of what exactly where we doing in these places? We seemed to be looking for something, but what on earth was it? What did my mother want?
The other mysteries that hovered over us were more rooted in the distant past. Audrey had been born in poverty in the slums of Liverpool and then evacuated to
