Or was it that prisons and hangings were on my mind?

The Public Record Office, like the Society of Genealogists, was one long intelligence test.

Within the echoing polished limestone of the vast entrance hall, dwarfed by space, I stood at a counter that was just a bit too high—I was actually on tiptoes—and filled out a form. Down on the other side was a man whose eyes never met mine and whose pale face showed no expression during our whole interaction.

In exchange for my form I eventually got a small laminated card and moved on to the next part of the test. A sign told me that in the Reading Room I could use only pencils, so, feeling rather clever, I bought some from the woman at the shop. Another sign told me that I couldn’t take my bag in. Fair enough, and there were the lockers. The lockers needed a coin and I didn’t have the right change, so I went back to buy another pencil. The woman was waiting for me, pencil in one hand, locker-coin in the other.

Upstairs, kindly women with glasses dangling on large bosoms explained how to register myself on the computer and order my documents. First, though, I had to find my documents. Guided by the women I looked up big green folders of ‘class lists’. This meant documents of different classes: the class I was after was called ‘Home Office, Series 17-19, 48, 54 and 56: Petitions’. I entered my request through the computer. Then I went next door into a sort of glass room within a larger room, and joined another queue to get my Reader’s Number.

It was a long queue and it wasn’t moving quickly, and after my experience at the entrance desk, and with the women with the dangling glasses, I wasn’t confident I was in the right place.

‘Is this where I get a Reader’s Number?’ I asked the man in front of me.

‘Indeed it is,’ he said. With the slowness of the queue we got chatting. He had white hair, a red face, a vaguely sailorish kind of beard. ‘It used to be just dusty scholars here,’ he said. ‘Now everyone’s interested in medals and family history or they’re Australians and New Zealanders looking up their ancestors.’ He gave me a look: a twinkle-in-the-eye sort of look, an I’ve-got-you-worked-out sort of look.

I was irritated at this smug sailor-man, annoyed that he’d stereotyped me as that comic cliche, the middle-aged Australian lady looking up her ancestors, probably in search of a duke.

HO 17/423 consisted of a brown cardboard box tied up like a Christmas present with pink tape and embossed with a crest and ‘Supplied for the Public Service’: old-fashioned, austere. Someone out of Dickens might have had a box like this.

Inside was a leather-bound volume, a little bigger than foolscap size, not a book so much as a folder, with original documents, all different shapes and sizes and weights of paper bound into it. This wasn’t exactly ‘leather-bound’. That was a familiar concept of tooled volumes with the titles in gilt and marbling on the endpapers. At the fundraising fete for the children’s school, someone occasionally donated a leather-bound book to the secondhand bookstall. It was always snapped up early by one of the dealers.