But the constant disturbance to my father’s sleep cycle wore him down. For the two weeks of the day shift, he was morose. My brothers and I, and my mother, too, saw less of him than we had when he’d been working in the park. He’d get home from work around the same time as I got home from school, unless he could get overtime, which he always worked if there was any to be had. Workers weren’t considered cooperative if they turned it down and were marked for the sack. For a while in the 1960s, overtime was guaranteed.

The two weeks of night shift turned our cramped house into a place of dark and terrible quiet. No one dared speak above a whisper while he was in bed during the day. He’d get up in a foul mood that got worse as the time to clock-in drew closer. His face became darker and greyer. The light caught the copper stubble on his cheeks. He hardly spoke at all. My mother talked a lot, often about her work, and that maddened him, and this lack of communication was desperately frustrating for her. In the evening, when my father was doing overtime, she would knit pullovers for all of us and eat boiled sweets in front of the little box of a television, with its volume down low because the baby was sleeping. Sometimes I heard my mother crying in the night and I never knew what for.