We enter through a dark garage. The side door to the house is open, framing the solid and unexpectedly bronzed figure of her carer, who tells us Win has just had a fall and is very shaken: we may come in, but only to say hallo. The house is cool after the heat outside – the kind of heat wave the British, who can’t avoid being obsessed with the weather, are going on and on about. Our feet sink into comfortable cream carpets in a well-ordered sitting room with French windows opening onto a tidy garden. Win lives, in her 98th year, on a modern crescent in a Domesday book village called Wheathampstead. The village is near the town of St Albans in Hertfordshire; Win has always lived here, at first with her parents and grandparents, then with her husband and her son. Wheathampstead is deep in Titmuss country. There are Titmusses everywhere – Titmuss fields, Titmuss farmers, Titmuss millers, Titmuss poultry dealers, Titmuss pet food suppliers, Titmuss catering businesses. I am introduced as ‘Ann Titmuss’: I have come home.

Win, short for Winifred, is my third cousin. Well, she’s one of them: there are many more, all of whom, like her until now, I haven’t ever met. Win and I have the same great-great-grandparents: Samuel Titmuss, born in 1776, who married Sarah Ann Aldham, or Oldham, born in 1791. Samuel and Sarah Ann had 11 children, beginning with James, the eldest, Win’s great-grandfather, and ending with Herbert, the youngest, who was mine. This was a ‘long’ family: 20 years between the first and last child. I tracked Win down through the wife of another unmet third cousin, the amateur historian and constructor of family trees, Ellie Titmuss. It’s Ellie who takes me to meet Win.

Win is turned towards us in her wheelchair as we come into the room. She dominates the wheelchair, not it her; she hasn’t sunk into it, given into its denotation of dependence. She’s smartly dressed in a black-and-cream frock. Her legs are bare because of the heat and her psoriasis, which she points out to us, although it isn’t too bad today. I remember recoiling from this kind of old lady’s skin, thin like tissue paper and spangled with purple-blue sores and erosions, when I saw my mother’s, but that was a long time ago.