Jean Meyer is an accomplished painter who has spent most of her adult life in Italy, but she grew up in a terraced suburban house in Wirral, within the sound of the great ships of Liverpool and a ferry crossing away from the club where four mop-topped musicians were preparing to take the world by storm. Through the gate is a beautifully evocative memoir of those years which has been written as an imaginary voyage around her childhood home, focusing in turn on the events associated with each part of the house and garden. "With the idea that people leave their joys and tragedies in the fabric of the rooms they have inhabited, I have divided the story into the rooms of the house, each acting as the catalyst for remembering the things that took place there."