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Over the next few weeks we wooed each other in fonts and pixels – an email courtship that couldn’t be happening, I thought, because Susie was heterosexual and I have given up missionary work with heterosexual women. But something was going on and I had no idea what to do about it.

I had lunch with my friend, the writer Ali Smith. She said, ‘Just kiss her.’

Susie went to talk to her daughter in New York. Lianna said, ‘Just kiss her, Mummy.’

So we did.

In the place of trust with her I felt I could keep going with my search. Adoption begins on your own – you are solitary. The baby knows it has been abandoned – I am sure of that. Therefore, the journey back should not be done alone. The terrors and fears are unexpected and out of control. You need someone to hold on to. Someone who will hold on to you. That’s what Susie did for me day by day. Others of my friends did their part. Whatever else, the crazy time, and the adoption search, taught me to ask for help; not to act like Wonder Woman.

I had confided my fears to my friend Ruth Rendell. Ruth has known me since I was twenty-six, and she lent me a cottage to write in when I was trying to make my way. I wrote The Passion in her house. She had been the Good Mother – never judging, quietly supporting, letting me talk, letting me be.

She is a Labour peer, and therefore a member of the House of Lords. She knows a lot of people and she thought she could help. She summoned a few baronessess for a private discussion, and the consensus was that I should proceed with the utmost caution.

I am well known in the UK and if I was going to meet my mother I wanted her to meet me, not my public profile. And I could not face the newspapers getting hold of the story. Oranges is an adoption story, and Oranges is the book that is identified with me.

I may be paranoid but it is justified paranoia. I have had journalists stationed in my garden to ‘discover’ my girlfriends, and I fretted that some journalists would be only too happy to ‘discover’ lost mothers too.

So I just didn’t feel comfortable filling in a form and putting it in the post and going and telling my story to a social worker – a mandatory requirement in the UK, if you want to open a closed adoption file.

My search was complicated by the fact that prior to 1976, all UK adoptions were made on the basis of closed records. Mothers and children alike were assured of lifetime anonymity. When the law changed, people like me could apply for our original birth certificates, and perhaps then contact our long-lost relatives. But everything has to be done visibly and formally. This seemed fraught to me.

Ruth put me in touch with Anthony Douglas, chief of Cafcass – the UK children and family court advisory service. He is adopted himself, and after a meeting where he understood my predicament, he offered to help me to trace my mother without the risk of the whole thing leaking into the public domain before I was ready.

I gave Anthony the names I had carried with me for forty-two years – the names of my parents – Jessica and John – and their surnames, but I can’t write those here.

A few weeks later he called me to say that my file had been found – but only just, because the Southport Records Office – in my case the basement – had been flooded with seawater and many files had been irretrievably damaged. I looked up to heaven. Mrs Winterson had obviously heard that I was hunting and arranged a flood.

A week later Anthony called again – my file had been opened but the names I had given him did not match the names on the file.

So whose was that birth certificate that I had found in the drawer?

And who am I?

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The next step was to take the risk I was so afraid of taking and apply to the Home Office in the usual way, which meant visiting a social worker at the General Register Office in Southport, Lancashire.

Susie took the day off work to come with me and we agreed that I would travel up to London and meet her on the day, because it is better to sleep in your