Tess had hurried into the kitchen of the flat above the milliner’s shop and gone straight to the Welsh dresser. Gran had never made any secret of where she kept the folder and Tess pulled it out and rifled through the contents, but it proved to be no use since it held their old ration books, their identity cards, a great many wage slips and little else. Tess was turning away, disappointed, when it occurred to her that there was another drawer, into which she had never looked. She and Gran referred to it as ‘the old cutlery drawer’, and since the knives, forks and spoons it contained were indeed old they seldom, if ever, so much as opened it. But now Tess did so, and moving the cutlery out of the way she saw that the drawer did indeed hold something she had forgotten. It was a manila wallet with a little brass clasp, and as soon as she saw it Tess remembered having seen it once before. She had received a letter from the landlord explaining that their rent would be going up on quarter day. Gran had sniffed, nodded to herself a couple of times and opened the old cutlery drawer, beginning to move the knives and forks and then changing her mind, but not before Tess had caught a glimpse of the wallet. ‘Dear me, I must be going senile,’ Gran had said cheerfully. ‘This should be in my document folder, not amongst a whole load of ancient knives and forks.’

I wonder why she didn’t want me to know this was hidden under the cutlery, Tess asked herself, carrying the wallet over to the kitchen table and clicking the clasp open. Yes, this is the one Albert and the others want. There really are insurance documents, and lots of other papers as well. But I’ll take it back to the others, and we’ll look at them together. She began to pick up the wallet without first fastening the clasp and it promptly spilled a great many papers on to the kitchen table. Cursing, Tess began to shovel them back, pausing over one which had a pattern of flowers all round the top and announced itself to be the Birth Certificate of Edith May Rogers, 15 August 1905. Tess chuckled to herself. What a scamp her grandmother was! She had fobbed Tess off when she had asked her age, but now here was the proof in Tess’s hand. She began to push the birth certificate back into the folder, then stopped short. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she murmured to herself, ‘something’s wrong here. Gran told me her maiden name was Rogers, which means this is her birth certificate all right, but then if she was born in 1905 and I’m sixteen going on seventeen, and say Mam was about eighteen when I was born, then she must have had her daughter when she was only ten years old!’