In the early morning, before he wakes, I make tea. It's still dark. The screen of the baby monitor lends a grey light to guide my journey down the hallway. I tread gently, overstepping the loose floorboard before the kitchen. It's caught me out before…

The search lights are like long spidery fingers in the night, criss-crossing the sky, searching for the squadron of enemy planes. They are the only lights allowed…

My mother, no matter how desperate she was for a cuppa while waiting at train stations in Birmingham, refused to drink tea from their thick-rimmed cups and saucers. Well, they do say love changes everything…

As dawn breaks, the soft overnight symphony of cicadas and cuckoos are interrupted by the clash of kookaburras. I stir from the fetal position I favour every night. Bandit, my smoky-grey cat, nudges his head into my motionless palm, activating his own pat…

Are we competing? Her khol eyes widen. We squirm as a toddler torpedoes through the aisles. He gives a piercing scream. Our eggs on toast arrive. I snatch salt from a nearby table. She flicks her streaked hair…

Nobody ever heard him talk, maybe he couldn’t or maybe he just hadn’t anything to say. He was closer to an animal than a human being. He used to sit in the park, on the ground, as if he knew he didn’t deserve to sit on a bench…

He was losing control of me. I was regaining my independence: I had a job now, freedom. I was making friends and reconnecting with old ones. Things he had never done in his life. The usual argument followed, but this time I blurted, ‘I don’t want to live with you anymore.’

I took a quiet breath, stepped forward from the shallow light into the darkness. Another few steps and I stopped. Did I hear something? Did I see a distant movement? Again I moved silently, all the while imagining the eight stairs yet to come, the turn to the right and the long dark walk past five doors that led to my tiny bedsit…

It started early one beautiful sunny morning when I was 46 years old. My husband Dennis was getting ready to leave for his commute to work in Sydney. I rolled over for another hour of sleep…

She only sees them through eyes of pure compassion though, and I often wonder if there is a connection that she feels from her own experience, those parts of herself that seem to be buried so deep we may never see them in the light…