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The Scouser, by the way, was hung for murdering a cinema manager after the war.

He was wonderful to me all his life, was living Dad, and my real Dad could not have done a better job at bringing me up.

I was four when he married Mam. When he came back from the War and discovered that real Dad had been killed, he went to see Granddad and told him that he had loved Mam from afar for years and that to win her would would give up drinking and behaving like a lout and would get a job and looked after her and me. He was as good as his word. My Granddad grew to adore him, as did almost evryone who knew him. I was at the wedding, of course, and I cried and screamed in the pavement when the climbed into a taxi to take them to the station for their honeymoon. So they put me in the taxi with them and Auntie Hilda and they dropped me off and where we lived at that time in Liverpool Road, with Auntie Hilda, Great Granddad, who lived to be over a hundred years of age, Elizabeth and others, where I would stand at the bottom of the garden and watch the pigs as they rolled in the mud in the field on the other side. Mam and Dad went to Blackpool for their honeymoon.

I loved living Dad, and I don't think I ever told him either, and he never let me down, though I let him down all the time. The occasion I feel most guilty about is the time when he asked me to go to Wrexham with him to watch them play football. I said I would, but on the day I sat in the cafe next to the baths with all my friends, listening to rock and roll on the jukebox, and I watched him through the window as he looked up and down the streets waiting for me to turn up. Which I never did. Then I watched as he trudged back home, head down, hands in his pockets. He looked awfully sad. I have never forgotten that day, and I must have only been twelve or thirteen, and it haunts me even now.

Mind you, if real Dad had lived I would have been brought up in the Midlands and I would have one of those really awful Midlands accent, unlike the accent I have now, after being brought up in Wales. I have a Scouse accent.

Selwyn showed me the application form he had filled in for the Royal Navy, then he showed me the reply he got back some short time later. I still hadn't sent off my application, but that night, when I went home, I filled it in and gave it to Mam to post. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. Every day I would get up, deliver my papers, come in, eat breakfast, look for the mail, find there was none, go to school, not learn anything, talk to Selwyn, come home and listen to Top Of The Form or Journey Into Space (I still have one of the books). I'd go to bed each night expecting to receive instructions the following morning, but nothing happened. Nothing came. The Royal Navy didn't want me. Only swimming kept me going. I carried on training and winning as if I had no problems in the world. I began stepping out with the gorgeous Elaine, who I adored and who moved like silk in water. She was a backstroker too, which gave us something to talk about.

April came and went. May. June. Nothing from the Navy. Selwyn went for an intelligence test in Wrexham and passed. He told me the test was easy. As the weeks passed I moaned on and on about the Navy not wanting me for the Defence Of The Realm. It is terrible to be rejected at the tender age of fifteen and it is something from which I have never recovered. I live in absolute fear of being rejected from anywhere, from anything or by anybody. Imagine how I felt later in life when I decided to become a novelist (!), poet (!), songwriter (!) or when relationships crashed an burned and I always got the blame. Can you imagine?

In July I got a reply.

It was only years later I discovered that Mam had carried my application form around in her pinny pocket for months before Dad convinced her to post it on the grounds that I would either be rejected or change my mind.

Neither of those things happened.

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