It was early evening before the removal men finished unloading and we finally had time to slump in an exhausted puddle around the battered wooden table that mum had asked them to put out on the terrace beyond the french doors to the dining room. Tea, accompanied by doorstep sandwiches of fresh Polish Ryebread, hunks of salami and wedges of an indifferent plastic-wrapped Canadian cheddar; our first food since an excruciatingly early cold breakfast before the men had arrived to shift everything out from under us.

Dad began to revive first, after his second cup of tea, pulling his omnipresent notebook and pencil from the pocket of his jacket he looked out over the garden and began loosely sketching out the layout, making small notes in the margin. Already his vision for the new layout of this tired and neglected garden began to take a shape which, over the coming months, rapidly took form. The three major trees would remain, more or less intact, although the monstrous privet hedge dividing the large kitchen garden from the main leisure area would receive the shortest of short back and sides, once more allowing afternoon light to grace the dank and overgrown plot behind.

We kids were hyper; the day had been full of frantic energy with little attention from anyone to guide our efforts to help. Now as we ran slowly down towards bedtime the new and sudden strangeness of our surroundings sank in. For the first time we had bedrooms appreciably larger than our beds, rooms in which our boxes of books and toys felt lost. Rooms in which there were, as yet, little other furnishings than a bed and a small rag rug amidst the cold shining expanse of a freshly laid red-brown linoleum that still smelled of linseed and cordage. The thought of sleeping alone, at the top of the house, with mum and dad a floor below us was at once exhilarating and disturbing. New sounds crept frightful through the dusk as unknown pipes echoed to the passage of gushing waters, other and different beams and tiles shrank back from their expansive response to the day’s vanishing heat. The whole house felt, and was, alien. We went to bed that night exhilarated and wary in equal measure, unsure what the next day might bring: no longer sure of our automatic sleepy eyes half-closed way from bedroom to bathroom or toilet. Light switches and door handles no longer falling easily to hand.

No, this really won’t do! I was trying to create a sense that the move was, on the one hand, joyful and wonderful and at the same time filled with the myriad small tensions of the unknown, but that would be a lie. Or at least a misguidance. It wasn’t like that at all; the thing I remember most isn’t any sense of our parents being joyful or happy or any of those things which should come with an ambition achieved and a home of our own. Instead what I remember is the wan gray exhaustion on both their faces, worn down by too much effort over too many days and weeks; the dull manner in which they slumped into their seats at the end of a long and yet unfinished day. Dad didn’t get to sketching the new layout in the main gardens, or his plans for the studio or the kitchen garden until many days later. Mum didn’t politely take tea; instead she rapidly slurped her way through a mug full and then sloped off to our bedrooms to make sure we kids at least had a made up bed to sleep in that night. She didn’t get round to planning her indoor plantings for many months; not until the major decorations and refurbishments were completed.

The conflicts between reality and how we would like to remember reality don’t vanish as we age, they become instead ever more acute. In my case it’s a particular problem because I’m of that breed of storyteller who always seeks to embellish the truth, to add a fictional detail here, a factional furbelow there, all to aid in the telling of a good story. Sticking to the truth is going to be tough.

So, let’s start again: you got the basic picture; we’d just moved into our first real home. It was the evening of the first night there. What I’m trying to tell you about is the role of the three big trees in the gardens in what happened. Which tells you everything, and nothing. You see it’s a lengthy and long winded pun. The real story starts on the day some months later when Dad decided to do something about the garden; he’d drawn out the plans slowly over the intervening weeks, pacing the grounds, measuring and working out exactly where and how and what. The tree surgeon had been in to cut back the monstrous rambling Bramley and the privet hedge was now a perfectly manageable size, one small sycamore had been uprooted to leave space for his new studio. Over the next few weeks we took regular drives out to Nurseries all across north London in search of what he wanted; and after each visit vans delivered bulbs and mature shrubs and potted plants in an increasing profusion. Some went straight into their designated beds, others to holding beds which Dad had rotovated for the purpose whilst he renovated and restored the long-neglected grounds. It was barely the beginning of autumn but Dad was determined that the worst of the work should be completed before the start of winter. And so it proved. By early December the worst of the work was finished and Dad could turn his attentions towards the design and future construction of his studio.

Although he was entirely capable of wielding an engineering draftsman’s parallel motion to great effect when pressed to it, Dad was one of those engineers who can, with a few tiny scribbles of sketch, outline an entire design and from it produce the most complex of constructions. For his studio he wanted nothing less than perfection, so the winter that followed saw him sitting each evening after the day’s work was over producing sketch after sketch, inside and out, footings and roof, wiring and plumbing, and each was torn up and redrawn and each in turn torn up yet again and the whole started once again from the beginning. By late March, with the ground still clumped into claggy semi-frozen clods, he was finally ready to order up the materials, so off we went in the car to visit builders yards for the necessary cement and ironmongery, then down to the Lea Valley to the timber yards, in each a precise written order placed, the materials closely inspected, and money changed hands. By mid April the footings were in and the first of the heavy framing timbers arrived; seasoned Norwegian pitch pine, resinous and heavy and so dense that cutting those large timbers – even cross grained – could blunt a new saw. Each evening after dusk, when construction work had stopped, Dad would retire to the garage where he’d set up his temporary workspace, to reset and sharpen the saws and chisels. It was there I first learned the art of setting an edge; 9 years old and barely safe to hold a blade, let alone hone it.