When my mother moved to her bungalow, she off-loaded on me the black bin bag she had been sitting on, containing all my childhood sayings and doings. My brother and sister got their bin bags too. Although junior school was a charmed time, from age eleven I lived at a boarding school three hours away from home, visiting the house where my parents lived for just sixteen weeks of each year. Amongst the first needlework, the first painting, the first writing, are letters: the ones I wrote and the ones I received during my seven years at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

The day I chose to open the bag was not ideal. I was off work due to stress, on medication for insomnia, stalked by my credit card companies, and cleaning for a disabled lady I had found by advertising my services in the local post office. Delving into my past meant I had to delve into my adolescent pain, something my parents preferred not to see, something that wounded me severely.

For a month I had been crying on my way to work, so I was already in the right place for a dive into wretchedness. Sitting cross-legged on the floor in the hallway of the home I was about to lose, I turned out the contents and began a rout of these souvenirs from another time. I had always had it in the back of my mind that I would do something with my diaries, the ones I had written from age nine to seventeen, but today I was feeling callous and determined to get rid of all this paper and detritus. One or two of the letters struck a chord and I set them to one side, to sit beside my diaries in a cardboard box in the attic, and the next attic, and the one after that. The rest of it, far too much of it, got binned. I pulled my socks up, returned to work as a solicitor, and forgot all about it.

After my parents passed away, I discovered their letters of courtship and my father’s diaries, which cover sixty years of his life. It dawned on me that if I added these to my story, the one I had left work to write, there would be a depth that my diaries and letters from school alone could not provide. Two diaries, covering the same day and the same year, told such different stories. Now I have a book.