Curiosity outweighed her anger now. ‘OK, so obviously he’d married my mother, so he couldn’t come back and marry Cleoniki,’ she said, frustrated. ‘But it’s not the crime of the century, surely? People change their minds, don’t they?’

‘Yeah, like my cousin Lenny,’ Lana piped up. ‘He got jilted at the altar by his fiancée Meryl – she ran off with his own brother!’ They all stared at her. ‘Terrible, it was. Mind, they went ahead with the buffet ’cos it would’ve been a waste not to.’

‘Hush, Lana,’ said Catrin.

‘They had an ice sculpture an’ everything.’

‘I mean surely,’ said Judith, ignoring Lana, ‘you’d have understood? You’d have forgiven him?’

When Maria translated this, Sofia began to cry.

‘She says of course! There would have been anger maybe at first, but eventually there would have been forgiveness. All this time, Sofia believed and so did her mother that Georgios had done something bad. That he was maybe in prison. Or worst of all, that he had ended his life. They had no idea what could be so terrible to make him cut off from his family like that, and his country. He loved Cyprus.’

‘Ítan gálos anthrópos,’ Sofia wept. ‘Gálos anthrópos!’

‘She says he was a good man,’ whispered Maria.

Judith took Sofia’s hand and sighed. ‘He still is,’ she said.

The shame had obviously been too great for George. To have come to Britain to better his prospects and save money for his family in Cyprus, fully intending to go back and marry Cleoniki. But instead he had met Patricia, fallen in love with her and started a brand-new life in Wales, becoming father to little Judith. Sofia simply wished he had told them. Just to know that he was still alive all these years would have spared them from so much heartache. But the saddest thing was that their mother, Alathea, had died in 1984, believing her son was no longer alive. It was all too too sad.

Looking directly at Judith, Sofia said, ‘Thélo na ton do! Thélo na tou milíso! Aderfós mou.’

‘Sofia wants to know when she can see her brother – when can she talk to him?’ Maria said.

Judith panicked at the thought of orchestrating such a reunion. It was too much for her. Feeling like she was six again, she just wanted her dad to make it all all right. ‘I don’t … I don’t know …’ she stuttered. ‘Tell Sofia please to be patient. I need to go home, and I need to think and work out what to do, but it will happen.’

Maria nodded, understanding.

‘I promise she will see her brother again.’

As she lay on the small camp bed that night, Catrin and Lana out for the count on the sofa, Judith stared up at the ceiling. So many thoughts raced around her head. How much life she’d wasted ignorant of the existence of her Cypriot family; how she wished she could stay here longer and not leave tomorrow – and how on earth could she hop, skip and jump her way through the rest of the trip, all jolly hockey sticks, knowing what she now undeniably knew?