Just before the first lockdown, I took some old and interesting books from the Oxfam shop so that I would have something to research in the idle weeks ahead.

( I did leave a note of what they were, and that I had them in case anyone thinks I was half inching them.)

Well, they got put in the Best Beloved’s study and I have to say I forgot about them until recently when I was clearing out my bits and pieces of boxes and files in there.

One was a very plain board covered book called The Place Names of Warwickshire. I am not sure why I even looked inside it as it was battered, and we have limited space to stock battered books about somewhere Petersfield book shoppers  are probably not that interested in.

Anyway, I did look inside and there was nothing about the place names of Warwickshire.

The pages had no printing on them at all.

But they did have the handwritten life story of Edith Chadwick Horner who was, a bit of reading on found, part of the Fagg family of Kent.

This was a pretty worthless book unless you were researching that family.

So, I went look for who might be. You have to subscribe to many of these ancestry sites and needless to say I didn’t want to do that but after trying the free Mormon site and coming up blank, I found RootsChat.

Not the easiest of sites to navigate and clearly there not for dilettante types like me.

But I did manage to post what I knew and lo and behold, a couple of days later I get a message from her grandson.

He had and old typewritten version of her story but not the real thing. He wanted to buy it and I offered to post it to him.

Turns out his brother lived in a village a few miles down the road.

Well, well, I thought.

So I could imagine the brother had the book all along, had a clear out and had never looked inside and decided he too did not need a book on the place names of Warwickshire – and it ended up as a donation in Oxfam.

That indeed turned out to be the case when he came to collect it.

The mystery still remained of how and why she had written it in a bound book with blank text pages.

Turns out the brothers’ father worked at Cambridge University Press ( he was also a poet and artist of some renown) and the press made up a blank book of every publication presumably to check they had enough pages, all was in order etc.

These were two a penny in the press and so he would take them home and use as notebooks, maybe sketchbooks, and clearly to give to his mother so she could write her life story.

I do a like a union/reunion of a book with the people who are meant to have it.