The trouble with family-known-things is that they always seem peculiar if you try to explain them to anyone else. I’ve probably made us sound like hostile hermits who move the furniture across the front door if a stranger turns into the street, but it isn’t that bad. Dad always gets on all right with everyone he works with, and Mum gets on fine with all the people who go into the shop for medicine or advice. She even knows most of them by name and what their troubles are. It’s just that it doesn’t go much further than that with them.

Then suddenly this distant relative, Kathleen, who none of us had ever heard of before, wrote from Canada to say she was doing some research into family history. That was a bit of a shock because when we think of ‘family’ we just think of the four of us. Neither Mum nor Dad had brothers or sisters, and their parents died a long time ago, so we don’t go in for aunts and uncles and grandparents. When there’s just the four of you, all in the same house, you don’t expect to have a history.

She’d enclosed a piece of flimsy paper, folded up small, which opened out to show a huge family tree, with gaps and question marks all over the place, and her name and ours underlined in red. Mum and Dad had looked aghast. All those people! It was like an unexpected invasion of dead great-aunts and second cousins and all the rest – and that wasn’t all – some of them were still alive!