I’m going to go off the subject of Dai Davies for a minute here. Look at that last bit again — I was too proud to ask for help. That was the part Dai Davies couldn’t be blamed for, that wasn’t his fault. It was mine. I should have asked for help. Should have talked to other women, should have talked to your father, should maybe have talked to my father and mother. But I didn’t. I thought it was all my fault. Maybe if Td asked for help I would have had some. I really want you to remember that, John — if you don’t ask for help, you don’t get it. And there may be times when you need it. You in particular, because, to be honest, your life will be much harder than it should have been. Perhaps not in terms of money but, in terms of other things. If you need help at any time ask for it. Pride can trip you up any time. Remember that.

Anyway, I know now that Dai Davies had already decided to leave me when I told him that I was pregnant with you. I think that to understand the next bit you have to know a little bit more about your father. He was the vainest person I have ever met. To be fair, he did have a lot to be vain about. In our tiny basement flat, which was always untidy no matter how hard I worked at it, there was only one mirror, in the bathroom. I hardly ever got the chance to look in it because your father was always there first, preening himself. Brushing his hair, clipping his moustache, cleaning his teeth. But usually just looking at himself, just standing there and staring at his reflection. As I said, he had a lot to be vain about. But I now realise he also had a lot to be modest about.

Just as I have a lot to be honest about. It hurts me to tell you the rest. It won’t take long. Some of these things I found out after your father left and I often think that if Td known them then, when I needed to know them, everything would have been different.

When I told your father I was pregnant, he’d already met someone else, another woman he loved more than me. Tike I say, he did love me, he just didn’t love me enough. And maybe I wasn’t very lovable. He didn’t leave me straight away — he did stay with me while I was pregnant. But then a terrible thing happened — I got German measles when I was three months pregnant. It’s a common disease and it’s not that dangerous, unless you’re pregnant. Because it means the foetus might be damaged. It can be damaged in many ways — it might be deaf or blind, it might be spastic, it might even have webbed feet. (And that makes me smile because I think you’d have liked webbed feet.) Thing is, your father was, as I said, very vain. He wasn’t happy with the thought that his child might not be as handsome as he was, might not be as perfect as he thought he was. He certainly wasn’t very happy with the thought that his child might be damaged. It was illegal to have an abortion then but my doctors suggested that I had one on medical grounds. You have to remember that this was before the days of X-rays and scans so no one could check what was going on. You were a mystery locked inside me.