She never asked her mother for anything — she'd learned early that some questions weren't worth the disappointment. Then one ordinary afternoon, on the way home from the shops, her mother pulled the car over without a word of explanation. What happened next, over two tickets and a tub of popcorn, became the clearest happy memory she has of a woman who could hand you something lovely and something that stung in the same breath.

The Rabbit

I must have been seven, maybe eight. We were driving home from the shops — nothing special about the day, just one more ordinary errand in a house that ran on errands and arguments in roughly equal measure.

Then I saw the poster outside the cinema. A rabbit on it. Watership Down.

I wanted to see that film so badly it hurt a bit.

I didn't ask, though. By seven I'd already worked out which questions were worth asking in our house and which ones weren't, and this one wasn't. You learn that early if you're paying attention. It's easier to disappoint yourself quietly than to ask out loud and get told no in front of everyone..

So I said nothing. Just watched the poster go past the window and told myself that was that.

Then the car pulled over.
"Out you get."

That was it. No explanation. I remember getting out not really understanding what was happening, and then Mum took my hand and walked me back towards the cinema like this had been the plan all along. Two tickets. A tub of popcorn. And suddenly I was sitting in the dark with my mother, about to watch a film about rabbits, for no reason I could work out except that she'd noticed I wanted to.

I cried through most of it. If you've seen Watership Down you'll know why — it is not the gentle afternoon a seven-year-old expects from a poster of a rabbit. But I don't actually think that's why I remember the day. I think I remember it because for those two hours it was just the two of us, and nobody was needed anywhere else, and nothing was expected of me.

That doesn't sound like much written down. In our house, though, that kind of thing didn't happen often. There was always somebody who needed something — a sibling, a chore, a row that needed managing. Having my mother to myself, on purpose, felt like winning something I hadn't even known I'd entered.

My mother used to tell me how much she'd wanted a girl, and how glad she'd been when she got me. I'd glow for a second. Then she'd add, in the same breath, that she "hadn't been prepared for how much of a whinger" I'd turn out to be. That was her all over. She could hand you something lovely and something that stung in the same sentence, and never seem to notice she'd done both.

She was like that generally. Glamorous — properly glamorous, the kind of woman people described afterwards as tall, even though she was only five foot four, because of the way she carried herself into a room. And underneath that, unpredictable in a way I didn't have words for as a child. Some weeks she couldn't get out of bed. The curtains would stay shut for days. Then, with no warning at all, she'd be up before anyone else, house scrubbed top to bottom, off out the door to sort out money from somewhere.

I don't know which version of her decided to pull the car over that day. I like to think it doesn't matter

What I do know is that I never asked her to. I never once said "please can we go and see that film." She just knew, somehow, without being told — and for a woman who kept as many things to herself as she did, that still catches me a bit, all these years later. That she could be so hard to read and still see something as small as a seven-year-old staring at a cinema poster.

I don't remember the seats, or whether the popcorn was sweet or salted, or who else was in the car that day. I remember the rabbit on the poster, and "out you get," and crying in the dark, and my mother's hand.

She never explained herself that day, or any other — but for those two hours in the dark, I didn't need her to.