I had planned to throw the bottle back into the sea to continue its journey. My friend and I would come to some arrangement with the Sheerness lifeboat crew. We would travel from the shore where the letter was found to the furthest point of their patrol, where the currents drift northwards to the Arctic. We would be dressed in fleeces and waterproof jackets, but we would probably be cold and damp and miserable. Then, when we had reached the limits of the lifeboat’s range, we would take the bottle and hurl it as far as we could, out over the waves. There would be a blue glint of farewell, and then it would be gone, swallowed up in the ocean. In the dull grey, we would look and look, but it would be gone, ‘forever rocked by the ocean, in the ebb and flow of the rolling waves . . .’

But what if I had missed something in my researches? What if there were just one more avenue to pursue? What if the writer appeared and wanted the letter back? I realized I was not quite cured. I replaced the bottle in its harbour of tissue paper, cradled in its protective box, and hid it away. I would throw it onwards. But not just yet.

At first I had been sure I would succeed in tracing the letter-writer. My worries had been less about failure and more about how the mother might feel at having her identity revealed. Devastated or pleased? I had also fretted about what she might be like. Would she live up to expectations? Would it not be better to leave her undiscovered? I feared that I might end up meeting not a tragic poet, but someone far more banal and everyday. Although part of me felt that she would be pleased that I had spent so much time looking for her, pleased that we wanted to know about Maurice, pleased that he might live on for other people who had never known him, I did worry that the letter was a form of closure for her and that it would be discourteous to infringe on her grief. And perhaps by writing this book I have.