So it was a relief, twenty-five years ago, to be in the place where they matched. I saw daffodils fluttering and dancing in the breeze, I heard my first cuckoo of spring, I felt the dread as a sunless English winter closed in.

It felt that I’d come home.

I bought English clothes and an ancient English bicycle, heard myself acquiring something of an English accent. Would rather have died than go to see the changing of the Guard, the way mere tourists did. Would rather walk for miles, getting more and more lost, than stand on a street corner with a map in my hand. My day was made if someone mistook me for a local and asked me the way.

I eked out my visa with all kinds of casual jobs: I wrote captions for the illustrations in textbooks, edited documentary films, worked as a typist for companies that made soft drinks, computer printers, sheet music. I wasn’t looking forward to the day my visa would run out and I’d have to go back to Australia.

Eventually, though, I came home. I’d changed, but so had Australia. Migration from all around the world had transformed an outpost of Britain into something more complex. The national anthem no longer began ‘God save our gracious Queen’ but ‘Australians all, let us rejoice’. We were writing books, making music and doing paintings that were something other than imitations of what was happening in Britain. No one seemed to have heard of Biggles any more.

I was glad to be part of this new thing that was happening. I got on with work and family and made a good life. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

So being back in London after a quarter of a century was an odd and complicated feeling. I met my earlier self around every corner—that person who’d felt like a stranger in her own country, who wouldn’t acknowledge that she was really a foreigner here, in England.

I’d told Melissa about this feeling and said that I was planning to do some research into family history while I was here. After our conversation, it felt even more important to find out more about that shadowy man, Solomon Wiseman.

5
The Society of Genealogists

I imagined that this family history business would be tidy: a matter of stepping from one fact to another. I had an idea of myself as an orderly researcher, with index cards and colour-coded folders. The past could be put together like a jigsaw puzzle, I thought: take enough time, have enough patience, collect enough facts, and it would all make a picture.

The logical place to start was at the beginning. Where was Wiseman born, and when?

Like so many London addresses, the Society of Genealogists was a kind of intelligence test. When next day I finally found the street called Charterhouse Buildings—a cul-de-sac full of rubbish bins somewhere up beyond St Paul’s—I felt pretty cocky. I was an old London hand, after all.