I was six years old when my father died.

You would think that after all these years the events of that night would have faded from my memory but they are still lurking there in all their colourful detail, waiting in ambush like the pirates in my childhood dreams.

‘Wake up!’

It was my mother’s voice, piercing through the layers of sleep, her hoarse words stirring the air close to my ear and interrupting my restless dreams: breakers pounding harshly against a hostile shore, a fragile craft, like a splinter of jet against the granite waves, whipped by wind and rain on to the rocky teeth of a storm-lashed cove while I strove vainly to save her hapless crew. Valiantly as I strained against the inertia of sleep, my limbs refused to obey my will, and my voice, like theirs, was drowned by the screaming of gulls far above my head.

‘Wake up!’ My mother shook my shoulder.

Why was it necessary to wake up in the middle of the night to join my parents’ shadowy world when I was needed so urgently in my own vivid one?

‘It’s your father,’ she was saying. ‘You have to help me.’ And then, most worrying of all, she added, ‘I don’t know what to do.’