Writing What I Don’t Remember

By Helen Bouchami

For the first two years of my life I lived, with my parents, in the coal cellar of my grandparents’ boarding house. In the immediate post-war years, housing was scarce, but other rooms in the house, proper bedrooms, were available but kept locked, reserved for visitors who might seek respite from the ‘dark satanic mills’ of inland Lancashire in this, their favourite seaside resort.

I suspect this experience had a profound psychological effect on me, the more potent for...