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.

Not because of anything he had done as a father. The letter is very clear about that and so is the file, which I have now seen.

There was a conviction from 1987. He was nineteen. It was a serious one and it is not mine to put here, and he served time for it, and it is the reason he was working nights in a yard at thirty-six with ten children.

In 1994, when their mother died, that conviction came onto a new kind of file.

The social worker told him, informally, in a car park, that the assessment was going to go against him and that ten children do not get placed together and that the likeliest outcome was four placements across two counties.

And she told him one other thing.

That the single factor most likely to change the outcome was a stable second carer in the household who was already known to the children.