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her thinking about travelling too.
    Middlesbrough had seen its best days. When Julie and Keith were growing up in the seventies it was impoverished and struggling. Times were tough for everyone, including Julie’s parents, Anita and Robert Sullivan, who lived in Eston, a working-class suburb to the east. Keith’s parents had moved to up-and-coming Brookfield, in the south, where they lived with their three sons in a tidy post-war bungalow, its pristine garden being Charlie’s pride and joy.
    Julie and Keith had met as fifteen-year-olds at the local comprehensive, Bertram Ramsey. Keith was not particularly interested in Julie, but that changed when he bumped into her again five years later, inside the blue double-doors of Madison’s, a dive of a nightclub in Middlesbrough town centre, better known to locals as Mad Dog’s, where a famed cloakroom attendant called ‘Queenie’ took the coats. Julie, full of life, her hair a cascade of brown curls, and Keith clicked in a way they had not at school. By then, lanky Keith, the oldest of Charlie and Mavis Mangan’s three boys, had set himself up as a self-employed electrician, one of a group of school pals who had all gone into trades. Julie already had a sensible head on her shoulders, and she could see that unlike many other young men she knew, Keith was determined to do something with his life.
    His mates described him as level-headed and laid-back, ‘a good bloke to have around in a storm’, while his father Charlie, who hadbarely ever left his native Teesside, was proud of his eldest son’s inquisitive nature, saying to anyone who would listen that Keith ‘soaked up new experiences like a sponge’. Keith was also, Julie now noticed, tall and good-looking, sure of himself but not arrogant. When they met at Mad Dog’s she was working in Clinkards, a Middlesbrough shoe shop. Chatting in a corner by the bar, they found they had many friends in common. By the time Keith celebrated his twenty-first birthday six months later, on Boxing Day 1982, at the Central pub on Corporation Road, Julie knew she had found the man she wanted to marry. Keith made her laugh. He was dependable and loving. And both of them had a geeky thing for Star Trek .
    Three years later, they became the first in their group to tie the knot. The wedding was a traditional affair of red carnations and frothy white chiffon at St Barnabas church in Linthorpe. Their white-leather wedding album shows Keith, dressed in a silver suit and winklepickers, towering above his new bride. After a make-do honeymoon, Julie became the daughter Mavis Mangan had never had. Straight-talking and easy-going like her new mother-in-law, Julie enjoyed a laugh, and embraced her new family, ringing up Mavis for a chat most days, always starting the conversation the same way: ‘Hello, Mrs Mangan, it’s Mrs Mangan here.’ That’s why Charlie and Mavis were so taken aback when Julie and Keith announced out of the blue in 1989 that they were leaving for London. Nobody in either family moved away, especially south.
    But Keith and Julie lived for each other now. Leaving their home in Ingleby Barwick, a residential estate south of Middlesbrough town centre, they rented a small flat in Tooting, south London. It was a big wrench for both of them, leaving a real neighbourhood where they were surrounded by friends and family to live far away, among strangers. Middlesbrough was always only a phone call away, Julie would say to herself whenever she was alone, but in a new city as vast and anonymous as London, she struggled to make friends.
    To start with, the Tooting flat didn’t look much, but Julie tarted it up. Keith, already planning their next jump, hopefully to somewhere hotter, put his energies into developing his business, andbegan picking up contract work all over Europe. It wasn’t the kind of travelling he had had in mind: without Julie, just a bunch of lads who rarely saw anything but the inside of one project or another. But