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.

He had no idea I had worked out who I was. He thought the frame had upset me in some general way.

And then I said: "Alec. That's my mother."

And he put the tray down on a stool, which is the only thing he did at speed in that entire afternoon.

What came out over the next four hours is that Alec Hartnoll has had that frame on a wall since 1981.

It is the only photograph he has of anybody from before 1963. He does not have a picture of his own mother; he does not know what she looked like.

He put the letter in with the photograph because it was the last thing that came, and because — he said this quite matter-of-factly, in a front room, at seventy-one — you keep the last one.

And the reason he was in that town at all, and the reason he had spent four afternoons talking to a widow from England about jazz records, is the part I had not got to.