A moment that changed me: water flowed into our boat – and my parents were at a total loss

On an ordinary trip out in my father's boat, we began taking in water. For once my mother could not comfort me and it felt as if life's invisible chaos had become clear

It wasn't something you would think of as particularly grand - a white boat, the shape of an iron with a stripe down it, maybe a foot or two larger than an estate car. Named after my mother, it lived in a sort of car park for boats, where it rested high up on a trailer and a tractor would come to take it to the shore. A couple of checks were performed - the battery, maybe; something around the engine; a rubber bung that went in the drain in the back of the boat to stop water coming in. My parents didn't often go out on the water together; perhaps the day I'm remembering was why.

The boat was my father's thing, really. He came from a family who built planes, raced motorcycles and sailed ships. At one point, before a fast house move consigned them to a yellow skip, our garage had the kinds of tools to maintain a yacht with: clonky wooden planes and sharp-angled items for working metal. Honestly, I don't know what these things were for: they seemed ageless to me when I was a child, and full of purpose - the implements that carved Stonehenge.