So as I stood outside the prison gate that cold January afternoon I knew that I was all alone in the world and I faced the daunting task of having to rebuild my life from scratch. My future was bleak and uncertain – and it didn’t feature Joe. Joe. My beautiful baby boy, the child whose birth was supposed to have heralded the beginning of an exciting new future, a family, a life. But I had ripped all that apart in one moment of madness. At that point, standing outside the prison, there was very little hope. I was forbidden from seeing Joe until I could reassure the social worker I could secure work and a roof over my head. I also had to take anger management classes to control what the judge had described as my ‘volatile temper’.

My situation couldn’t have been more hopeless but then I put my hand in my pocket and found the crumpled piece of paper Grace had thrust at me as I left the cell. It was a rough drawing showing a map with the name of a village scribbled across, Harrowby, and a picture of a house, the words ‘Rowan Isle House’ printed in capital letters below. At the top of the map, Grace had written: If you ever need a place to stay, it’s yours. You won’t need keys, just give the door a good push. And remember, Lisa, you’re stronger than you realize.

I’d thought it was a sweet gesture then put it to the back of my mind, though later, when I had found a job working on reception at an estate agency in Clapham, I’d googled Harrowby on the office computer and found that it was in a remote part of the Yorkshire Dales. At that time, the idea of upping sticks and tramping off to Yorkshire didn’t even cross my mind. For one thing, I was just finding my feet after coming out of prison – as well as the new job, I’d also managed to secure a house-share in Balham, on the other side of the river from Joe and Mark. And for another, well, I was a London girl who had little clue about the north of England, let alone some obscure Yorkshire village in the middle of nowhere.

But the reality of being apart from Joe was so painful I found it difficult to cope. I could deal with it in prison because it was an alien environment, somewhere Joe had never been part of, but going to visit him in our old neighbourhood, walking past the places I had taken him to as a baby – the park, the little cafe on the high street where they gave him boxes of cloth books to play with, the library where I got him his first library card, aged nine months – and the fact that my visits to him had to be supervised by Mark, was too much to bear. Every time I said goodbye to him at the door of the house that was once my family home and trundled back on the Tube to the attic room in a house full of strangers, I felt like my heart was being ripped apart. The pain was physical and more acute than anything I had ever felt before. Once December came around and Christmas songs started to be played on the radio I felt like I could quite easily die from heartache. The thought of spending Christmas holed up in a room in some strange house while my little boy was celebrating with his dad and family was inconceivable. So I formulated a plan.