‘He’s known for a long time, but not at first.’ She gestures to a bench and we sit down next to each other, looking, I imagine, like any other mother and daughter out for a walk on a sunny late summer afternoon. But I’m aware how young she is to have a thirty-nine-year-old daughter. Her face is plump, with only a few lines around her eyes; her hair is still thick. Sixteen, she was. And here I am pushing forty, having not yet managed to have children. How different our lives have been.

‘He didn’t know until Hedi was – you both were – about twelve.’ She shakes her head. ‘He loved Hedi – adored her – but as she grew up, things deteriorated between us because he suspected Hedi wasn’t his.’ She pauses. A hard line has formed between her eyes. ‘She didn’t look like either of us, you see. And though he wouldn’t even have considered she wasn’t mine, he thought that I… He thought I’d been with another man, perhaps with a seasonal worker at the farm. He even asked if someone had forced himself on me. I wondered if he thought…’

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She waves her hand briefly, as if brushing away a bad memory. ‘You know, it wasn’t easy, our life together, back then. We had so much to deal with. For the first few years I was constantly scared the authorities would catch up with me, especially after those unpaid hospital bills, and I was very… upset about everything. Now they’d probably give it a name.’

‘Depression?’

She nods. ‘I think the only thing that got me through that was Hedi, my darling girl. I had to be okay for her.’ She looks at me. ‘I know what I said, that I thought it wouldn’t hurt as much if they took her from me – but I soon realised that wasn’t true. I’ve always loved her as my own and tried to do the very best for her.’

I meet her eyes and see that’s true.