‘Mum said, “Oh, I’m not supposed to have a birth certificate,” and the lady said, “Everyone has one, and you can have yours if you want it.” And I suppose they’re used to dealing with the trauma there because she also said, “You don’t have to say yes straightaway. You can sit and think and tell me what you decide.”’

Ruby remembers sitting with her mum in the waiting area while she made up her mind. ‘I was trying to stop Rocco from saying, “Do it, Granny, do it!” I wanted her to decide in her own time.’

After about ten minutes of what Ruby called ‘faffing around’ her mum finally declared she’d ‘have a look, and why not?’

The lady behind the counter smiled, made a few clicks on her keyboard, and went behind a partition, coming back with Agnes’s birth certificate, a copy of which Ruby had in her file. It read:

Name of Infant: Agnes Joan Bell

Date of Birth: 19 September 1940

Place of Birth: London Hospital for Mothers and Babies, City Road, London

Mother’s name: Roslyn Joan Bell, 16, factory hand, London

Father’s name: James John Olarenshaw, 20, able seaman, London

Ruby waited for me to finish looking at her copy of the document.

‘I can still see Mum’s face when she was holding that, or should I say the original of that,’ she said. ‘She had no idea, not until that day, what her parents were called. She had tears streaming down her face, and because she was crying. I was crying.

‘She kept saying, “Look at this. I had a mum and a dad,” which was exactly what she’d always been led to believe in the orphanage.

‘She kept reading her dad’s name out loud – James John – and she said, “Look, he’s an able seaman, so he was probably at war.” And, “Roslyn. Ros. That’s a pretty name, isn’t it? And look, she had a job in a factory. Probably making things for the war effort.” So she was standing there at Births, Deaths and Marriages, coming up with a whole history, a whole back story, with that piece of paper in her hands.’

I handed the paper back to Ruby, who folded it carefully along the creases.

‘It was Stella who had the idea of searching through all the newspapers from 1940 to see if Mum’s birth had been recorded anywhere,’ she said. ‘You can do all that on the internet these days. They were at it for hours, searching for words like “Agnes” and “Bell” and “Olarenshaw” in the old copies of the London Times, Mum with her glasses on her nose, scrolling through the pages. That’s how we found out that the hospital Mum had been born in – the London Hospital for Mothers and Babies – was bombed during the war. It was a direct hit, right on the corner ward, where the infants were sleeping, and it happened on 21 September, so two days after Mum was born.