My son.

I might have passed him on the street and not known he was mine. All those missed years. My throat tightens and my eyes well up. Will I ever know him now? Properly know him? Will he ever call me Mutti and come to me when he has a problem? Unlikely. A lifetime of memories have been stolen from me, but he is alive, and he looks well and happy. That is all a mother could ultimately want for her child.

He meets my eyes and we gaze at each other. I can’t read his expression and, no doubt, he cannot read mine either. We are strangers, my Stanley and me. Everyone and everything here – the café, the clink of china cup against saucer, the smell of freshly ground coffee, the background chatter – fades away. It is just us.

I have dreamed of the moment I would be reunited with my son for fifty-six years. That it is happening, right here, right now, is too vast to take in. I’m numb, almost, with the shock of it. We are really here, in the same country, standing in the same room. This man, searching my eyes, just a few short feet away. What can he think of me, a daughter of the Reich, who abandoned him as a baby. I’m shaking with fear and emotion. But then he dips his chin into a nod and smiles, warm and unjudging, and I feel a rush of gratitude.

We will be okay, Stanley and me. It may take some time, but we will be okay.

He stands to one side to enable a boy of around fifteen to come through the door, long-legged and already taller than his father, awkward in his own body and hiding behind a curtain of dark hair.

My grandson?

Now a girl, presumably the boy’s older sister. She glances around the café and her enormous blue eyes meet my gaze. My breath catches in my throat. The resemblance is extraordinary. She wears a big floppy jumper over ripped jeans and her long, dark curls bounce over her shoulders. It is as though I am looking at my seventeen-year-old self. Strange to think that, at her age, I had already given birth to Stanley.

I wish there was one more figure to come through that door. But there are no more. I think of the letter in my handbag, the contents of which are imprinted in my mind. The unfamiliar hand begins:

My dear Hetty,

I am writing this hasty response to catch the next post, so you do not have to wait a moment longer for a reply to your wonderful letter. I shall send you another, longer, and more detailed in the next day or so. I send this with mixed emotions – firstly of joy to find you are indeed alive. Walter never gave up hope of trying to find you, after the war. He spent years making fruitless enquiries and only found dead ends and then communication with East Germany became almost impossible for an outsider. We feared you had not survived the war. To find out you are alive and well is indescribably wonderful.