IIIIt didn’t take Patrick long to travel the eighteen odd miles from the modest town of Stannimore Cross to Plimpton Market where Pop lived in a warden controlled flat.
Patrick found that he liked living in a place where a ten-minute drive in any direction took him out into glorious countryside. He’d grown up in an overcrowded detached house in Hastings with four siblings and a cantankerous father. His mother did her best, but family life was chaotic and noisy. He would escape to the beach to smell the sea air and listen to the raucous calls of the gulls, but he had no space, no privacy, and he hated it.
It had been bearable, just, when Pop and Mamie lived just around the corner: after the ‘big falling out’ they moved back to Pop’s childhood home and Patrick didn’t see them again until h
