The Second Chance Café in Carlton Square. Michele Gorman

I twist my head away from my mother’s snatching fingers, I look out the window and straight into two strange faces. They look about as old as God and his secretary and as surprised to see us as I am to see them.

      ‘Oh! Excuse us,’ says the man. ‘We thought we saw someone inside…’ He grasps the woman’s hand. ‘We’re terribly sorry to disturb you.’

      ‘No, no, don’t be sorry,’ calls my mum through the window. ‘We’re renovating the pub.’

      The man hesitates. ‘It’s been decades since we’ve been inside.’

      ‘It smells like it,’ I murmur, then realise how rude that sounds. ‘Since it’s been open, I mean.’

      ‘Would you like to come in?’ Mum asks. ‘You’re very welcome.’

      ‘We shouldn’t bother you,’ says the woman, but I can see that she’s dying for a snoop.

      ‘It’s no bother, really, come in. Just a sec, I’ll open the door.’

      They’re even older than they looked outside, but they come nimbly through the door like they own the place. They’re both wearing long dark wool coats against the February cold snap.

      ‘I always hated that carpet,’ says the woman, seeing the pile I’ve made in the corner. ‘It stank to high heaven. But then so did a lot of the men who drank ’ere.’

      ‘Present company excepted.’ The man removes his flat cap and bows, showing me the top of his balding, age-spotted head. ‘Carl Brumfeld. Pleased to meet you. And this ’ere’s Elsie.’

      Their accents are as local to East London as my family’s is. After I make introductions, Elsie asks, ‘Are you the new landlord?’ Her face is nearly unlined, but her hair is snowy white, spun into an intricate sort of beehive on top of her head. Auntie Rose would say she’d look younger with it coloured, but she says that about everyone because she does hair.

      ‘It’s going to be a café,’ Mum tells them. As she relays this, her pride even tops her bragging about me going to Uni. And that was monumental.

      ‘Oh,’ they chorus. ‘That’s a shame,’ Carl says. ‘We were hoping to get the old place back. This is where we met, you see.’

      ‘When was that?’ I ask. Just after the dawn of time, I’m guessing.

      ‘Nineteen forty-one,’ says Elsie. ‘We were children during the war. We used to sit together in that booth right there.’

      ‘Wow, seventy-five years.’ Mum whistles. ‘What’s that in anniversaries? Diamond is sixty. Of course you couldn’t have been married so young!’

      ‘We’re not married now either,’ Carl says.

      ‘Carl is my brother-in-law,’ Elsie adds.

      Which does make me wonder why they’re holding hands. ‘You’ll come back when we’re open, won’t you?’ I ask. ‘Maybe you’d like to sit in your old booth for a cup of tea.’

      Where I’ll be able to winkle their story out of them. A café is the perfect business for a nosey person like me to run.

      ‘We’d like that, thank you,’ Carl says. ‘You’re keeping the booths, then? It would be nice for someone to take account of history around ’ere instead of tearing everything down to build flats.’

      ‘The booths are staying,’ I assure them.

      Carl’s words stay with me after they leave. It would be a shame to strip the pub of its history if we don’t have to. Except for the carpet. The history of spilled pints and trodden-on fag ends will have to go.

      ‘Daniel’s out tonight,’ I tell Mum as we pull up the rest of the carpet together. Despite my promise to myself, the words are out before I can stop them.

      She halts her ripping to glance at me. Her gingery bob has come loose from its hair tie and she keeps swiping it back behind her ears. She is pretty, though she doesn’t usually wear much make-up. Only when she’s doing things like trying to impress Daniel’s parents. Then she goes for full-on slap, even though my mother-in-law doesn’t bother with it herself.

      ‘And you hate him a bit, right?’ she asks.

      Instinctively I want to deny it, even though I’ve just brought it up. ‘I’m trying not to, Mum, and I know you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t.’

      But Mum shakes her head. ‘I was going to say that I understand. After you were born, when your father got to go out in his taxi every day, I wanted to puncture his tyres. I wanted to puncture him sometimes. He used to complain about how hard it was driving around all day. I would have bloody loved to trade places. Believe me, you ’aven’t got the monopoly on resentment.’

      Resentment. Is that what I’ve got? ‘It’s just so hard,’ I say.

      ‘I know, love, but it gets easier when they’re in school.’

      ‘Nursery?’

      ‘University,’ she deadpans.

      I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Mum understands. She and Dad didn’t wait long after their wedding to have me either. Everyone keeps telling us how lucky we are to be young parents. We’ve got more energy, they say. We’ll still be youngish when the children are grown. But what about the decades in between? At the moment, it looks like a long time between now and then.

      Mum gathers me into a carpet-dust-filled hug. ‘It’s always harder than you think it’s going to be. Thank goodness I had your Gran and Auntie Rose. Your Granny Liddell was no help.’

      ‘Thank goodness I’ve got you and Dad and Auntie Rose now,’ I say.

      Mum nods. ‘Your Dad’s a dark horse, isn’t he? He’s so much better with the twins than he ever was with you. He’s got more confidence now than he did then. He was terrified of making a mistake with you.’

      ‘Weren’t you terrified?’ I’m constantly worried that I’m doing it all wrong or that I’ll damage the twins somehow. I could be feeding them too much, or not enough, leaving them to get too hot or too cold, smothering them with cuddles or not paying them enough attention, pushing them to learn new things or being too laid back, letting their faces get too dirty or wiping them so much that they’ll end up with allergies. They might be underdressed or overstimulated, under-cuddled, over-coddled, disgruntled or disappointed. Just off the top of my head. I could give you another ten lists like that every single day.

      ‘Of course I was afraid to mess up,’ Mum says, ‘but I didn’t have a choice. You had to eat and be held and changed. If I didn’t do it, who would?’

      That’s exactly how I feel. It’s not that Daniel can’t do it too. He’s just not as good at it as I am. And lately he’s seemed to leave more and more to me while he gets on with his life.

      I always seem to have toddlers hanging off me when I try getting on with my life. Just try being glamorous with ladies who lunch when you’re saying, ‘Get that out of your mouth,’ every two minutes.

      Not that I’ve ever been glamorous. And my friends aren’t ladies who lunch, but you see my point.

      Today it’s my turn to host everyone at the house, so despite having had to shove most of the toys under the sofa and the unfolded laundry into the closet, I’ve got the easy part. Just try going anywhere with the twins. Trying to move a circus is less challenging.

      ‘Maybe if they didn’t act like they’d invented nuclear fusion every time they changed a nappy, I wouldn’t mind so much,’ my friend Melody says, talking about husbands as she shifts her child to her other breast. Speaking of having children hanging off you.

      Melody and Samantha, Emerald and Garnet – four women who at first had no more in common with me than leaky boobs and sleepless nights – are the reason I’m holding on to my sanity.