“Blackpool,” he said with confidence, studying the image. “This was taken in Blackpool. We were there for the illuminations in November. Tricia, your mother, was about three months pregnant. With you.”

I took the photo back and looked again closely at the young man standing next to a dark green Ford Cortina, as I had done hundreds of times before. I glanced up at the man in front of me and then back down at the picture. I couldn’t say for sure that they were the same person, but, equally, I couldn’t say they weren’t.

“It is me, I assure you,” he said. “That was my first car. I was nineteen when that picture was taken.”

“How old was my mother?” I asked.

“Seventeen, I think,” he said. “Yes, she must have been just seventeen. I tried to teach her to drive on that trip.”

“You started young.”

“Yes… well.” He seemed embarrassed. “You weren’t actually planned, as such. More of a surprise.”

“Oh thanks,” I replied somewhat sarcastically. “Were you married?” I asked.

“Not when that picture was taken, no.”

“How about when I was born?” I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know.

“Oh yes,” he said with certainty. “We were by then.”

Strangely, I was relieved that I was legitimate and not a bastard. But did it really matter? Yes, I decided, it did. It meant that there had been commitment between my parents, maybe even love. They cared, or, at least, they had then.

“Why did you leave?” I asked him. It was the big question.

He didn’t answer immediately but sat quiet, still looking at me.

“Shame, I suppose,” he said eventually. “After your mother died, I couldn’t cope with having a baby and no wife. So I ran away.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“Australia,” he said. “Eventually. First I signed onto a Liberian-registered cargo ship in the Liverpool docks. I went all over the world for a while. I got off one day in Melbourne and just stayed there.”

“So why come back now?”