‘Sylvia seemed very interested in what had happened to me. I didn’t know why, back then,’ Anna continues. ‘I thought I was just unlucky in the life I’d had. I didn’t know it had happened to thousands of other children, too, that it was a systematic failure. I didn’t know the government would later apologise for a system that took us from our homes and deemed my mother and others like her to be unsuitable parents.’ She breathes out a short, sharp breath and looks down at her feet. ‘What a thing to say! My mother loved me and my sister, even if she couldn’t always provide for us. She wasn’t unsuitable, she was just alone, and poor, and unhappy. It wasn’t acceptable to be divorced in a small community in the 1960s, so everyone looked down on her. Mum had no family in the area, no one to support her, so she got a job, but people said she was neglecting Cornelia and me for going to work – there weren’t many childcare options in those days – and then rumours started about Mum and a local man. They said she was living a “loose life”, and that’s why she lost her job – and then us. Instead of trying to help her, the authorities took her children from her and left us in a place far, far worse than the home we’d left. And they never came to check we were okay, they never seemed to care what happened to us.’ She shakes her head. ‘Society was completely against women like my mother, women who didn’t behave as they wanted.’ She sighs. ‘But then people are good at making bad decisions, I certainly know that.’

‘What do you mean?’ I’m completely lost, desperate for clarity and trying to process everything she’s said, like my brain’s two steps behind her, struggling to catch up.

She waves her hand as if to brush away my question, and I see she’s going to have to do this in her own time. ‘Sylvia – your mother,’ she says, faltering on the last word, ‘heard about my background from Evelyne, Daniel’s sister, and she wanted to write an article for her newspaper. I think she saw it as a… what do you say?’

‘A scoop.’ I’ve always known the story of my birth. That Mum was in Switzerland on a commission for her paper and gave birth prematurely in a hospital in Lausanne. But I never knew – or at least, I never thought to ask – what the article was about. I just assumed it was a follow- up to her first piece, the one I retrieved from the paper’s online archive, and that it never actually got written. It blows my mind to think it was about Anna, about my biological mother. They actually met. They spoke. And they parted with the wrong babies.