Jimmy shook his head. ‘Mam said her family wanted her to marry a neighbouring farmer. In fact, she meant to do so until she met our dad. They made a runaway match of it and cut themselves off from their relatives completely. The only thing we know is her maiden name – she was Grace Griffiths – and that she grew up on a farm somewhere in Wales, only I can’t remember where: Rith something, I think.’ He looked enquiringly at Miss Trent. ‘What about you, miss? Will you go back to your folks? You said you came here from Yorkshire, didn’t you?’

There was a long silence before Miss Trent spoke. ‘I can see I shall have to come clean,’ she said resignedly. ‘I’ve always kept my past life a secret; as far as possible, that is. I reckoned it wouldn’t help my chances in life to admit that I was – am – a foundling.’ She turned and smiled at Mo, who was staring at her in obvious puzzlement. ‘That means that one morning a housewife opened her front door and found a box on the top step. The box had a baby in it and that baby was me. The housewife thought that I must have been left on her doorstep by mistake, since there was an orphanage only a couple of doors further up the road. I don’t know anything about her at all except that she carried me in my little cardboard box along to the Sister Eulalia Home for Girls and handed me over. There was a note pinned to my blanket in true storybook fashion, but I didn’t know about that until much later, when I went to teacher training college. You see, when a child leaves an orphanage she’s given everything she possessed when she entered the establishment. Some orphans, of course, know all about their past and have relatives who visit them quite regularly, but foundlings are different, so all I was given was a little nightgown, a blanket and a note in a foreign language, which I couldn’t understand. At college I was in a dormitory with five other girls, and when I tipped my belongings on to my bed on the first night the girl standing next to me pounced on the note. “Are you Welsh, cariad?” she asked me. “This is yours, isn’t it?”

‘So naturally I said it was and asked her to translate it for me. I suppose I had hoped for a clue to my identity, but all it said was “Please take care of my baby. I will come for her as soon as I can. Bethan”.’ She smiled at the two children. ‘So if you go into Wales to search for your mum’s relatives, and since I have no work at the moment, I might do a lot worse than accompany you, and try to find my own roots.’

‘I say, that’s real romantic,’ Jimmy said, his tone awed. ‘So foundling means orphan! Gosh, Miss Trent, then in a way we’ve all got a connection with Wales. I know Mam could speak Welsh, although she never taught it to us, of course – Dad only spoke English – but it’s a clue, isn’t it? Or does everyone in Wales speak it?’