This is what you actually get

Two up, two down, on a terrace in Openshaw, and there were seven of us in it. The front room was kept for best, which meant it was kept for nobody — I can count on one hand the times I sat in there before I was fifteen. It smelled of polish and cold.

The room I remember is the kitchen, because it was the only one with any real heat in it. Mam had a stove that had to be blacked every week and a clothes maiden that lived permanently in front of it, so you were always looking at the world through somebody's damp shirt. We ate at a drop-leaf table that was too small, and the one who got there last stood up.

There was no bathroom. The lavatory was in the yard and you took a candle in winter, and you did not linger. Bath night was a tin bath in front of that same stove, filled from pans, and I was fourth in the water so by the time it came to me it was grey and going cold. I did not think any of this was hard at the time. It was simply the arrangement, and everyone in the street had the same one.

What I would give to stand in that kitchen for ten minutes now.

Office boy at a cotton shipping firm on Whitworth Street, fifteen years old, one pound twelve and six a week. I gave my mother a pound of it and thought I was a man of the world with the twelve and six.

The job was mostly legs. I ran letters between offices, I fetched tea, and I took the post to the main sorting office at half past four whatever the weather. The one skill they taught me properly was how to answer a telephone, and I was drilled on it — name of the firm, then your own name, then "how may I help you" — until I could do it half asleep. I have answered the telephone that way my whole life and it has never once done me any harm.

What I remember most is the smell of the sample room. Raw cotton has a smell like warm dust and it got into everything, your hair, your jacket. Fifty years later I caught it somewhere and I was fifteen again, standing in a doorway waiting to be given something to carry.

The firm's been gone since the seventies. The building's flats now. I walked past it with your mother and told her all this and I could see her deciding whether to be interested, bless her.

A dance at the Ritz, 1961, and I want to be honest — I did not notice her first. My friend Kenneth noticed her first and spent twenty minutes working up to going over, and by the time he had, she had been asked by somebody else and was on the floor. Kenneth took it very hard.

I got talking to her at the cloakroom afterwards, entirely by accident, because we had been given each other's tickets. She had my coat over her arm and she said, "This is far too big for me and I suspect it's yours." That was the first thing your grandmother ever said to me.

My first impression was that she was quicker than I was. That impression never changed and it was correct. She was funny in a dry way that took people a second to catch, and I liked that I caught it straight away.

I asked to walk her to the bus. She said I could walk her to the corner, and we would see about the bus. We saw about the bus.

Fifty-one years. I would do the whole thing again tomorrow.