A tutor came to our house in the evenings to give me extra lessons.

Mrs Telman found my mother a job in an office-machine factory in Stepps; the same factory Mrs Telman had been on her way to inspect when her car had picked up a puncture.  We ate better, we had proper furniture, a phone and, soon, a colour television.  I found I had a lot fewer uncles than I'd thought I had, and Mother stopped walking into doors.

When I left Miss Stutely's and entered Kessington Academy in Bearsden, we moved from our terrace in Coatbridge to a semi in Jordanhill.  My mother was now at another factory, helping to make things called computers, not adding machines.  She never married but we went on holidays with a nice man called Mr Bullwood.  Mrs Telman came to visit us every few months, and always brought book tokens for me and record tokens, clothes and little things for my mother.  My mother died suddenly at Easter 1972, while I was on a school holiday in Italy.  We had taken buses, ferries and trains to get to Rome, but I flew back alone.  Mrs Telman and Mr Bullwood met me at Glasgow Airport and took me in Mrs Telman's car — still driven by Gerald — straight to the cemetery in Coatbridge.  It was a warm, sunny day; I remember watching her coffin disappearing behind the curtains at the crematorium, feeling worried that I could not seem to cry.

A smallish man with shaking hands, wearing a shiny and badly fitting suit with a black armband up by one shoulder, came to me afterwards and breathed whisky over me, telling me with tears in his rheumy red eyes that he was my father.  Mrs Telman put an arm round my shoulder and I let myself be guided away.  The man shouted things at us.