There wasn’t the slightest possibility, my mother assured me, there wasn’t the faintest, the smallest, the remotest likelihood of anything of the kind I had intimated ever having befallen a single one of my forbears. She vouched, with extravagant confidence, for all of them. For a start she knew that none had ever been to Dorchester. My father’s mother, it was true, had once spent a day in Bournemouth, but she was far too mean ever to have granted a stranger a sniff of her perfume let alone anything else. And my mother’s own mother, as I knew, had been too timid ever to set foot outside the street. At the age of eighty she still hadn’t got around to learning English even though she’d been born in Mill Hill. She never needed to, as my mother had often explained. She had the baker she could speak yiddish to on one side of her, she had the butcher she could speak yiddish to on the other, and she kept hens in her own backyard – so why should she worry? I could see that she shouldn’t. As for my mother’s mother’s mother – she had arrived from Lodz in a wheelchair and had never been allowed out of her husband’s sight; and my father’s grandmother had not once left Lublin. How much further back did I want to go?

‘That’s far enough,’ I said, ‘though it still leaves you.’

‘Me?’ I have never seen a woman so shocked. But it didn’t seem to be my sexual indelicacy that had shocked her. ‘Since when do I ever have holidays?’

She gave me a long frank look, which meant that I had to give her a long frank look back. It wasn’t easy. Looking at my mother, close up, has always been a disconcerting experience for me. We look so alike. It’s as if I’m staring not just at my own reflection but into my very mystery, in drag. It makes my head spin. It makes me feel that I need to lie down. Which was how I handled it when I was a baby.