In 1968 we lived in Corby, where my parents owned a fish and chip shop. Back then, at 18, I wasn't a complete novice with girls but I was still a virgin - the Swinging Sixties never reached the wastes of Northamptonshire.
Every year in July the family would make a pilgrimage 'back home' to Wales to see my mum's sister, Auntie Kath, and her family. I'd managed to duck out of it for a few years, but that year my mum guilt-tripped me into it so, sulkily, I slouched into the car, stuck in the back seat between my 14-year old sister Charlene and our 7-year old brother Billy. I was supposedly meant to act as the grown-up, there to stop them squabbling all the way. To be fair Char just buried her face in teen magazines most of the way but I'd never been on a long trip with Billy before and he was an insufferable pain, constantly wriggling about, poking me in the ribs and yammering away. When he started in on "Are we nearly there yet?" after just half an hour I started clipping his ear until mum gave me The Look and a slit throat gesture in the rear-view mirror.
Suffice to say, we emerged from the car in Llewellyn Drive, Tredegar, after several hours all feeling hot, tired, crumpled, irritable and, in my case, sticky from the orange squash I swear Billy the little bastard had managed to deliberately spill over me. Standing at her front door to greet us was Auntie Kath; it had been five years since I saw her but she didn't seem to have changed a bit: 54 years old, at five feet nine just an inch shorter than me and as thin as a rake except for a surprisingly ample bust (dad used to describe her as a broomstick with two balloons tied to it), neatly permed black-grey hair, a rather rodent-like face with small dark eyes and a long pointed nose and, despite the summer heat, dressed in a grey cardigan I think she was probably born in.
She scuttled down the garden path with a big hug for mum, a much briefer and less enthusiastic one for dad, a pat on the head for Billy and pecks on the cheek for me and Char. She looked me up and down appraisingly and chirped "Oh my Kevin, haven't you grown? And such a good-looking lad too - obviously take after your mam. How long is it now?" Being a typical teenager I tried to smother my smirk at the unintended double entendre but mum caught it and gave me another Look.
Auntie bustled us inside and called "Dor, get the kettle on." My cousin Doreen, looking as if she was hiding an over-inflated beach ball under her dress, emerged from the parlour, as Auntie Kath liked to call it, and swayed in the direction of the kitchen. On entering the suffocating atmosphere of the parlour we encountered Uncle Edgar, looking like a skeleton covered in grey crepe paper, swathed in a blanket and with a two-bar electric heater going full blast next to him. He was 12 years older than Auntie but could have been taken for 80 or more due to numerous ailments, some of them related to his 40 years working down and around coal mines.
We made polite conversation for a while, then Auntie cleared her throat significantly. It seemed we had a slight problem with sleeping arrangements. Uncle Edgar had a special bed in the former dining room with various tubes attached to it, Auntie had surrendered her double bedroom to mum and dad, and one of the beds in the twin room had been claimed by Doreen who, six months pregnant, had just left her cheating husband. That left one single divan and a fold-down sofa bed between four of us.
Last time I'd come I'd had to share a single bad with my then-nine-year-old sister, with dad in the same room while mum and Auntie shared the double, Billy was in a cot and Uncle Edgar, before his health so deteriorated, had the sofa. This time, after a bit of discussion Char agreed, churlishly and with several threats to Billy, to share a single with him in the same room as Doreen. That left the sofa bed and, with dad at six-foot-four and 24 stone there was no way he'd fit on it with me, so he got the double bed with mum. Just as it seemed as if I'd be sleeping on the floor Auntie Kath piped up "Kevin could share the sofa bed with me, you wouldn't mind that would you love?"