‘I guess her mother would still have been in there with her. And Mum loved the idea of having survived such a dramatic event. She kept saying, “What must it have been like! It would have been pitch black! Somebody must have had to scoop me up! I would have been so tiny!”’

Ruby said Stella put all the newspaper clippings about the bombing into her assignment and nobody was surprised when she got an A. But I was interested to know whether Agnes did any research of her own, after Stella was done. Ruby nodded, saying, ‘Back then, the big question in Mum’s mind was, what happened to her own mother after she was born? Was she killed in the war or had she abandoned her?

‘We asked a couple of the girls at the Red Cross to run the searches for us – because the Red Cross in England does a lot of the searches for people who were raised in orphanages – but they couldn’t find a death certificate for a Roslyn Bell in the 1940s. We asked if they could search for a marriage certificate instead, and the girl came back and said, “You were asking about Roslyn Joan Bell? I’ve got a Roslyn Joan Bell, factory hand, getting married in July 1947 at St Matthews Church on Old Kent Road.”

‘We asked if we could see that certificate, and we knew straightaway that they’d found the right one because there was her name – Roslyn Bell – and who had she married? James John Olarenshaw, returned seaman, of Jarrow.’

The way Ruby tells the story, her mum wasn’t in denial about what she’d discovered. Neither of her parents had been killed in the war. Her father had joined the navy, and when he came back, he married his old sweetheart.

‘They’d found each other again,’ Ruby said, ‘but they hadn’t come back for Mum, and that hurt because the marriage certificate showed they were married in July 1947, and Mum was still in the orphanage in July of 1947. She didn’t ship out until October. So the question was, why didn’t they come and get her?’

I’ve done a few stories on the Forgotten Generation in my time and I asked Ruby if she knew that it wasn’t uncommon for poor English mothers, and single mothers in particular, to be told that their babies had died, or been adopted out, even though it wasn’t true.

She nodded, saying, ‘We know that now, because Doug told us. Mum’s parents did go back to the hospital where Mum had been left, and they did try to find out what had happened to her but they were told that Mum couldn’t be found. But I’m not sure we knew it then and it was very confusing and upsetting for Mum.

‘In any case, we kept on with the search, looking for any other documents that related to Mum’s parents – council rates or TV licence, that kind of thing. Anything that might show where they lived, or any new birth, but there was no other reference to them, not in any of the files we searched.