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After the Collected Works, we come next to three books from my early teens. A handsome hardback of Don Quixote, a paperback of It, and a dog-eared copy of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

These books are survivors, remarkable because they still exist. At the age of thirteen, on one long-forgotten day in July, I took each one down from its shelf in our country home and put it into a suitcase (along with Collected Works and the encyclopaedia of plants and trees, which went everywhere with me) to take to my aunt’s place by the sea for summer holiday reading. Because of this, these books were not in our house when my father’s second wife, the poet Margery Martin, burned it down and destroyed everything else that we had.

Let’s move on.

After the survivors, there’s another book by my father, The New Collected Writing. This is a thin, black book, a line of soot and desolation dividing the shelf like the K–T boundary. Its inscription reads ‘To Thomas, my son’. Dr Stanley Quinn left room for more words to follow, but must’ve reconsidered, or never got around to adding them. The rest of the page is untouched. And marks an ending, this book, a scarred and blasted Maginot Line between me and my father. A line that neither of us would reach across for the many long years that followed.