For a brief second, I look past her, towards where last year’s calendar hangs like a confession of guilt on the wall, still open on December, the month Anna died. If I went away, there would be no memories waiting to ambush me. If I got on a plane, I would swap a cold and harsh winter for a warm and fresh new world. It would allow me the space to breathe, and to think, and maybe even to get some answers about who I am, and why I was given away in the first place. Because no matter what David and Anna told me so reassuringly over the years, the facts remain the same. My birth mother did not want to keep me, and I want to know the reason why.

‘She is about as far away as a person can be,’ I say. ‘My real mother lives in New Zealand.’

4

One of the gifts Anna bought me for my twenty-first birthday was a five-year memory book. Bound in smart navy leather, it has gold lettering on the front, and is small enough to slip into a generous coat pocket. The idea is that you write a few lines each day, marking down anything of note, so that you are able to refer back to it later. So, rather like a diary, but with added meaning and fewer humdrum details.

I was useless at remembering to fill it in at first, but Anna never gave up encouraging me. David eventually joined in, too, merrily repeating what Dr Seuss said about never knowing the value of a moment until it is a memory. Thus inspired – not to mention keen for David to stop lecturing me – I started to fill it in every evening before bed. Soon it became a habit, like taking my multi-vitamin and applying night cream. If I ever went away from home, which was rare, considering how much I loathed to be parted from my horse, the little blue book would always come with me, and when I filled that one, I bought another the same.

Anna confided to me that she had been keeping memory books since she turned twenty-one, too, and would sometimes read me snippets as we sat curled up together on the sofa in front of the fire.

Given the limited space in the book, my adoptive mother had developed a real skill in summing people up in just a few words, and while they weren’t always the most complimentary of descriptions, they were always amusing in their simplicity.

Her ex-boyfriend, who she spent two years with before she met and fell in love with David, was referred to as ‘Bum bag beard’ throughout, while the neighbour who lived in the flat above her first London home was ‘Mr Anvil’, on account of his clodhopping feet.