The summer we spent at the cottage in Cornwall

Summer of 1958, before everything. My mother was nine years old. The cottage belonged to her grandparents on her mother's side — a small place near St Ives with pale blue weatherboard and a dog called Bandit who had learned to open doors.

My mother says it was the last time the whole family was together without knowing it. The aunts from Bristol, the cousins from Leeds, my grandmother still with dark hair, great-grandfather still alive and on his feet making tea at five in the morning.

There's a photograph. Twenty-two people on the porch. By 1965 they were scattered across four countries.