Flicking through the pages of Mum’s book of family birthdays, my gaze fell on a name that I didn’t recognise.
Laura, 3 September 1946.
‘Who’s Laura?’ I asked.
A sad look crossed my mum Marjorie’s face.
‘Laura was my first baby. Unfortunately, she didn’t live,’ she said.
My 8-year-old brain mulled over Mum’s words.
‘So she’d be my sister?’ I asked.
‘She would,’ Mum said, before heading into the kitchen to get dinner started for me, my big sister Lorna, then 12, and our dad Charlie, then 43.
It was 1960, and I didn’t hear Laura’s
