At 69, I sold my house to travel around the world despite my children’s protests — in Australia, a man invited me to his home for coffee, but when I walked into his living room, I froze.

Two letters to the church in Marley Bridge, in 1998 and 2004, both answered politely by people who did not know. A paid search in 2011 that went nowhere because he had my mother's name down as Partridge and she had been widowed and remarried in 1979 and died a Harker. Four pages of notes.

And then a woman of sixty-nine in a café on a Tuesday said the words Marley Bridge, and he went home that night and sat up until one in the morning with the folder.

And then he did not say anything for four afternoons.

I asked him why. I was not gentle about it, because I had just found my own handwriting on a wall and I was not at my best.

And he said: "I was working out whether you'd want to be found."

He said that the people in his folder had, as far as he could tell, stopped. And that a woman who stops writing to you does not necessarily want a seventy-one-year-old man turning up with a frame.