“... lifting furniture into it and other things wrapped in blankets. ‘Will he be coming with us?’ No reply. Which, in its way, was a reply. I was eight; I knew the game.I have no memory of the packing up of our home, just that I was standing on the pavement outside holding a small, colourful box whose lid closed with a tiny ...”

“... I was in my fifties had also to do with the growing likelihood, I felt, that my natural mother was no longer alive. And that if I were able to establish anything about her, only one of us was liable to come as a shock to the other. I was adopted in the early 1950s, many years before the Children Act of 1975 made it possible for adopted people to inspect their ...”

“... There was a strange atmosphere in our house. Someone was visiting our father at the weekend, but no one would tell me, or Angus or Anna, my elder brother and younger sister, who it was. A certain heaviness in the air suggested perhaps a doctor or priest. More likely, in those days, an aggrieved bank manager. The information, finally delivered on the morning ...”