In the lounge below her mother’s bedroom, with her laptop on her knees, having transferred the pictures of Connie’s paperwork from her mobile, Grace felt a solitary tear trickle down the side of her nose as she wished she could reach into poor Connie’s diary and sweep her up into an enormous hug. Although Jimmy had died a lifetime ago, Grace knew the sense of loss for a life you thought you were going to have never really goes away, and she wondered if Connie still felt it after all these years … if it turned out that she was still alive. And Grace was even more hopeful now that her instinct was wrong and Connie was still here.

She would love to meet her, to see a glimpse of the young woman she was reading about back in … she paused to click through her photo stream to find the date of the diary she was reading from … ah, January 1940. During the Second World War. So Jimmy served his country and courageously gave his young life so that others could live on in peace. But not for poor Connie; Grace imagined her life was shattered on losing her love, and therefore so very far from peaceful.

Grace made a note in the pad on the coffee table in front of her. ‘Jimmy died – 1940. Connie’s baby born 1940.’ So the baby would be in her seventies if she were still alive today, thought Grace, assuming the child was a girl on remembering the delicate pink hand-knitted matinee jacket and bootees. She vowed to read on and see if she could find the name of Connie’s daughter, as that would probably be the easiest and quickest way to find her mother, Constance di Donato, now that she knew the truelove mentioned in the later diary extract in Italy clearly wasn’t Jimmy. ‘Another man’ … Grace wrote on the pad, followed by, ‘Italian? Connie’s husband? Mr di Donato.’ And then she made a list of questions she would look for answers to in amongst Connie’s paperwork inside the unit.

1. Who is he?

2. Where did they meet?

3. Where is he now?

4. Was Connie’s baby (a girl?) adopted?

5. If not adopted, did the baby take Mr Donato’s surname?

6. Ask Betty to ask Maggie for advice on how we can look up the name ‘Donato’ on the ancestry websites that she uses to make her family trees.

7. Or, better still, how do we go about looking on the electoral roll?

Donato is an unusual name; there can’t be that many people with it, surely, and if Connie’s daughter did take her stepfather’s name and then never married, or even if she did, she may have kept her name in any case, so we could find her that way. Grace’s head was spinning as she went through all the possible options.