I’m not that ancient – she had me fairly late.

Today would have been my mother’s 100th birthday (she died at 85). 

Her parents were of minor landed-gentry stock, who were both educated in Germany (a thing in the late 19th Century) and who both converted to Catholicism – a step that cost her father his legal career. She was one of seven sisters, who went to Catholic boarding school. No cooking lessons (they assumed everyone had domestic help).

As a girl, she met King Zog of Albania in Paris – by accident (she barged through a crowd of people to see who was there). After World War 2, she married. She was at some point a member of the Young Conservatives, through which she once met (and disliked) Evelyn Waugh. Quite a few years later, she and my father split up. Some of my earliest memories are of books. I remember her telling a shocked neighbour ‘I don’t care what my children read, provided they read’. 

Another memory is the play group she started after an extensive battle with county education bureaucrats 40 miles away, doing local TV interviews and losing friends who didn’t want kids from poorer families allowed in. She helped found a – now very established – NGO fighting for single-parent families’ rights. And she got into the nascent feminist movement, attending Women’s Lib conferences, writing for an obscure radical publication and doing voluntary work including pregnancy tests for teenage girls. She would say she didn’t understand why women got married.

There was much more – but you get the picture of her trajectory of awareness and activism. I took it all for granted while a kid, and later put it down to separation from my father, plus eccentricity.

Fast-forward a few more decades, and she shocked her offspring, her array of siblings, nephews and nieces and all her many friends by announcing that she had had a baby in her late teens during the war. Her parents had hushed everything up, refused to let the father marry her (because he was divorced) and sent her off to an elderly aunt in the countryside until the baby was born at a discreet Catholic clinic and whisked away for adoption. For half a century she had constantly been using her first and middle names – as on the birth certificate – and now her daughter had tracked her down. 

And it all became clear.

Away for the next two weeks – going to an exotic part of the world I have never been to before. Should put some pix on Twitter, at least.