I was sixteen and not getting on at home with a drunken and aggressive step-father. So I spent as much time as I could other places. I was self-aware enough to recognise that the impuIse teenagers have to leave the nest played a part in the equation. I worked a bit as a dishwasher and cleaner and had just about enough money to go out drinking on the weekends.

I had some school-friends who lived in a big, ramshackle flat in Richmond, Surrey. They were a shaggy family, all of them had dark, thick unkempt hair, like I imagined cave people would look. The atmosphere at their place was very relaxed, the parents seemed not to have a fixed job and their five children did pretty much as they pleased. I was welcomed into their flock.

Although they were obviously broke, their flat was huge with many large rooms on several levels, built the Victorian times with high plaster ceilings and thick pine floors. One of the boys showed me a small workshop in which lay piles of boiled bones and a small band-saw. This was the father’s trade. He faked model battleships made by French prisoners in the 18th century. The prisoners were often held in old hulks in English ports and they would fashion model ships from the bones in their soup rations and sell them to the locals for pocket money. Nowadays they fetch a high price in antique auctions, although I would not buy one, knowing what I know now.

I was allowed to sleep over some days and I did as often as I could, trying to balance a guilty conscience about imposing on them, and the desire not to be at home. I would wake up on a sofa in the combined living room and kitchen and wallow luxuriously in the funk of a nights accumulated blanket warmth.

In the background I could hear the clinking of large mugs of milky black tea, smell the burning of toast and hear the low murmurs of a family slowly waking up together. I so longed to be part of of that kind of tribe, the off-hand hospitality, the caring carelessness, the love of a family unit unspoken.