My novels are about suppressed memories and buried secrets within families, and as a writer I find it endlessly fascinating what people conceal from their nearest and dearest and why, and the effect silence can have on subsequent generations. In this realm grandparents have a useful role.

Although my grandma (my mother’s mother) died when I was in my early twenties, I mourn her still. I loved her for herself, but also as a source of stories about our family. Sometimes I would visit her on my way home from school and we would drink milky tea and eat fondant fancy cakes whilst she reminisced about bringing up my mother and her twin sister during the war or the chequered lives of her own brothers and sisters - mostly long gone, for she’d been the youngest. Through her I felt I came to know them, these elegant Edwardians with their unsuitable marriages and their exotic sojourns in the Colonies. I learned about the stillborn eldest boy and the consequently over-doted-on second, the conniving fiancée of a third, Grandma’s closeness to her childless sister.

She also told me about family members I knew well – often with flavoursome commentary. She was very fond of my father, she told me, but had initially thought him too charming! And his mother, my other grandmother, had neglected him in favour of his brother. Sometimes I would have my own view on a matter and would argue back. All this enable me to regard my parents in the round. It helped somehow to know that my father had once been a very small, reserved boy, whose feelings had been crushed, that my mother had been a mischievous tomboy. They’d endured the deprivations of a World War, and had each carved out a career in circumstances of considerable difficulty. They weren’t just parents, and they certainly weren’t infallible! I came to understand them much better.

During my teens I listened to advice from my grandma that I’d certainly never have accepted from my mother. My grandparents’ house was my bolthole. They were always pleased to see me and always had time. I should learn not to lose my temper with my mother, Grandma told me, generously blaming it on my red hair. Our family was always good at maths, she said firmly once, which, perhaps irrationally, gave me confidence in the subject. Some advice I ignored, such as not to go out with a Catholic! I would spurn the jumble sale clothes she brought out with a victorious flourish, and declined to read ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’, which she gave me hoping to transform my teenage moodiness.

She did it all out of love, though - I knew that and loved her for it. One day I hope I’ll be a grandmother and that I’ll find a role my grandchildren value as she did.