Number of days since I started this blog: 83.

Number of days since I lost my literary agent: 2

I think I mentioned I had a planned Zoom call with Ericka on Saturday. Suffice to say it didn’t go well

She doesn’t like what she calls the new plot twist with Mum. She says it is contrived and that it is not a good idea to introduce something so significant at such a late stage in the novel.

I’d already had quite a few positive comments about this aspect of my blog from regular readers, so I told her so.

And she said, Who is the literary expert here, Sadie, them or me?

And then she said, Where do you see this novel going?

And I said, Do you mean how will it end?

And she said, Well no, obviously you have storyboarded the ending. I mean where do you see it going on the shelves at Waterstones? Is it chicklit or fictional memoir?

And I said, I have no idea, Ericka, I thought that was what you would help me with.

And she said, To be honest, Sadie, I’m not sure I can help you with anything. You started out well, but many of your chapters read like you have just written the first thing that came into your head.

So I said, Well, that may be true.

And she said, I think we had better leave it for now. When you’ve completed your second draft, you can send it to me and I will see if I can think of anyone who might be able to help you knock it into shape. It’s not for me, though.

And with that, our Zoom call finished.

To be honest, my mind was on other things. There was a lot riding on my trip to Waylands Heath to go through our mother’s private papers and find out more about her (and therefore our) Jewish heritage.

And I was feeling really guilty about snooping on her. It reminded me of when I was about ten or eleven and went through a phase of being absolutely obsessed with poking through her things to see what I could find. I used to rifle through her handbag when she was hanging out the washing, looking for love letters I suppose. There were none. Or delving into the mysterious carrier bags she kept in the back of her wardrobe, only to unearth old evening gloves and scarves.

But one day I sneaked upstairs and had a rummage through her bedside drawer. And I struck gold. Because there, wrapped in an old nightie, was a vaginal douche set, complete with orange rubber tubing, funnel and plastic nozzle. There was even a small plastic jug and a tube of something greasy. I had no idea what it was for, but I knew at once it was intimate and forbidden. And then, just as I had got the whole lot spread out across her bed, my mother came in and found me. I don’t know who was more horrified, her or me. I can’t remember what she said, but I know she made me feel that I had committed a mortal sin against her privacy. It was unforgivable.

This new intrusion felt even worse. Luckily Saturday was a slightly wet, windy day, so she didn’t want to sit in the garden. I settled her down in the sitting room after lunch with a cup of tea, some biscuits which I knew she wouldn’t eat, a crossword and another interminable episode of Inspector Poirot. I told her I needed to get some urgent things for the garden. I said I’d be back in under two hours, and that Lydia would call while I was out to check she was OK. I could tell she was suspicious.

And then I drive over to Waylands Heath. WH is the sort of place where, if you paint the front of your house too often, your neighbours judge you for showing off. But if you don’t do it often enough, they worry that you are bringing down the value of the other properties in the street. Or take masks. In Beecham where I live, hardly anyone is wearing them, even in Sainsburys. In Waylands Heath, even people out walking their dogs have got them on. And they observe the two metre rule with venom.

I parked in the small driveway, aware of the curtains twitching at the sight of my old Golf bringing down the tone, and let myself into the house. The hall smelt of my Dad, and I let out an involuntary sob. I had forgotten to bring any milk, so I made myself a cup of weak black tea and set about my search.

Earlier this year, Deborah Jane Orr’s memoir Motherwell was published posthumously. The contents of the family bureau is a central theme, and she writes beautifully about the importance of each item.

The Writing Desk, our family equivalent, used to be downstairs but is now kept in the third bedroom, once my sister Lydia’s room but now known as The Study. The Writing Desk is packed with small items I remember from my childhood such as Dad’s metal hole punch and a little wooden Scottie dog with a pencil sharpener in his tummy. Plus old chequebook stubs, jars of paperclips and old postcards sent by us to our parents from long forgotten camping trips to France. But mainly it contains their paperwork. Opening the desk feels like that time with the douche set. I keep expecting to hear my mother asking me sharply what the bloody hell I think I’m doing, looking at her private things.

For a while I leaf through folders of old credit card statements, my father’s pension payments, water rates, gas bills and so-on, all neatly clipped together in date order. There is a folder containing family documents – their wedding certificate, passports, driving licences and his birth certificate. But strangely there is no birth certificate for my mother.

I go through it all again, just to make sure I haven’t missed anything. I’m stumped. And then I remember the bedside drawer. And this is where I find what I am looking for. Possibly it was there the last time I went rifling through it all those years ago. But I am a better detective now. I find an old manilla foolscap envelope slipped under the drawer liner. It contains a faded photograph in sepia of a family of five, two adults and three children, with names written on the back in pencil. A very old letter written in a foreign language I do not recognise, and a naturalisation certificate.

And I learn that my mother, Helen Robinson, nee White, was born Hannah Ruth Weiss in Amsterdam on 13 February 1932 to Jakob and Ruth Weiss. She travelled to England in 1939 aged 7 on one of the last of the kindertransport trains, and was placed with a family in Hampstead Garden Suburb. And given what we all know, I assume that she never saw her parents or her younger sisters Sadie and Lydia again.

I rang Lydia and told her. It was a long phone call. I sent her a snap of the photograph and the writing on the back. We both cried and agreed I would not to tell Mum that we knew until Lydia arrived on Wednesday.

In other news, I wanted to tell Brian about the discovery. But it felt too momentous and I didn’t know where to start. So instead I drank too much wine and found myself confessing how much I regretted having sex with Richard.

And now I am newly single.

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