‘I am an only child, but for one year, when I was seven, I had a brother. David, also an only child, was three months older than me. I first met him when he visited with his father in the spring of that year. I was impressed by my uncle’s good looks, conflating him with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. His son – my cousin – sat on our sagging green settee, done up in a grey school uniform although it was the weekend, his socks tightly pulled up to his knees. My school did not have a uniform, and none of the boys I knew could have kept so still…’

Lesley Thomson writes in the Guardian about how being an only child has shaped her career as a writer.