I waited until after my grandfather died years later and there was a brief clearing in the fog of my grandmother’s dementia to ask why she thought they never came for me. ‘They didn’t have the chance to,’ she said, before revealing that my grandfather and a group of close friends had ensured my parents could never hurt another child again. Then he paid a crematorium attendant to open up after hours and dispose of their bodies. ‘But Dad was your son,’ I said. ‘Which is why we were duty bound. We brought him into this world so it was our responsibility to take him out of it.’
