My fiancé vanished a week before our wedding and left me his ten children. Thirty years later a man I had never seen knocked on my door in the middle of Sunday lunch.

He had not just gone from me. He had gone from all ten of them, and Tilly was two and Maud was eleven and the middle four did not understand what was being said to them.

My family told me to let the department take them. They said it kindly and they said it more than once and they were not wrong that it was not my job.

I was twenty-seven. I had a part-time wage and a rented house and no legal relationship to a single one of those children.

I adopted all ten.

It took two years and eleven months and it very nearly did not happen, and I am going to come back to that.

My parents did not speak to me for four years.

Men found out and did not ring again, and by about 2001 I had stopped mentioning it on a first evening, and by about 2004 I had stopped going.