MATT SIMPSON

Family Some nights, late, he wobbled home from work in oilskins streaming rain, his soaked cap limp, on a bike that bounced the dockroad cobbles,

and in the mood for striking out at all the grim estrangements in his life an ulcer brought home with his conscience from the war, which banished him from ships that steamed beyond the river mouth, dragging their smoke below the fixed horizon into other worlds; a wife whose proper pieties would only yield to sentiments coaxed out of him that he, before and afterwards, despised; and me, the son she knitted with a vengeance for.

And yet at weekends we were Family. The keen-eyed streets confirmed him Master when he led us out to cinemas or relatives - a dandy double-breasted man raffish in trilby like George Raft, he looked that cut-above-the-rest they knew his wife to be but puzzled over in the son, who wore a treachery, the impudence of knowledge in his eyes.

bewied up