This book is fiction and the characters whose stories are told are made up. However, my family’s history did give me the idea for the story and some markers around which to drape it.

My grandmother’s twin brother from Shevington, Wigan, agreed to accompany his sister on the ship to Canada to join her husband who had gone on ahead. He was meant to return to Shevington having safely dropped his sister off but, having fallen in love with a Scottish lady on the ship on the way over, he stayed in Canada for good. I have been to Oshawa many times to visit my lovely family who still live in the city. My great grandfather Idris was a miner in the Rhondda and decided when registering my grandmother’s birth that he would drop one letter from his own name and call her Iris. It was a privilege to have them all keep me company while I was writing.

The historical events that are the backdrop to the story are correct and a few of the characters are also real – members of the British royal family, UK and Canadian politicians, and the McLaughlin family. Parkwood, the McLaughlin family home, is now a National Historic Site, popular for weddings and as a film location. The Parkwood website and that of the Oshawa Historical Society were both hugely helpful when writing this book.

Mr and Mrs Dunington-Grubb, the landscape designers who worked on the gardens at Parkwood, moved to Canada from the UK in 1911 and set up one of Canada’s first landscape gardening businesses, called Sheridan Nurseries, which is still in operation today. When researching the Dunington-Grubbs and the Parkwood gardens I found a reference in a local Oshawa newspaper article to a head gardener at Parkwood called Mr Wragg. I hope he would not have minded his namesake having a part in this story.

The 1926 General Strike paralysed Britain between 3 and 11 May, 1926, when other workers came out on strike in support of the miners who were faced with a cut in pay by mine owners. On 12 May, 1926, the TUC announced the end of the General Strike as terms had been agreed with Stanley Baldwin’s government. The Miners Union rejected the agreement, and continued striking. The strike caused great hardship with many families dependent on public soup kitchens. Faced with starvation and many miners having already returned to work, the strike finally ended on 19 November, 1926. Between 1921 and 1931 there was a decrease of 21,371 in Rhondda’s population, as many families left the valleys to seek employment elsewhere, escaping from the General Strike, and I found many Welsh names in the passenger lists of people emigrating to Canada during this period. The website of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 provided useful detail about what it was like for people arriving in Canada around this time.

Between 1869 and the late 1930s it is estimated that 100,000 children were sent to Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand from Britain as part of the child migration scheme. Churches and philanthropic organizations such as Barnado’s, the Salvation Army and the Quarriers believed that the British Home Children as they became known would have a better chance in the the New World.

Some became members of the family but others were used as a cheap form of labour and overworked and neglected. Others were subjected to the stigma attached to being a Home Child – scum from the slums, as Jean is told in this story – and as a result often concealed their origins. In 1987 British social worker Margaret Humphreys brought public attention to the Home Children, leading to the creation of the Child Migrant Trust whose purpose is to help Home Children re-establish their identity and reconnect with relatives.

Over 10 per cent of Canada’s population is estimated to be descended from Home Children.

I grew up in Clydach Vale in the Rhondda and my primary school was Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Ynyswen. The Polikoff’s clothing factory was very near the school and most people knew somebody who worked there. Production at the factory had started in 1939 and in its first three months the workforce increased to nearly 1,000. In the 1970s the factory became known as the Burberry factory, latterly making Burberry polo shirts. When the factory was closed in 2007 around 300 jobs were lost. It would make me very happy if there was a real life Perfect somewhere out there willing to open a factory in the Rhondda.

My thanks go to Caroline Oakley, Honno’s editor, whose gentle prodding helped get this book written round and about my full time job as solicitor; to my sister Anwen Darwin who did a final proofread and found the typos I’d missed; and to my husband and business partner David Thompson for the male perspective he brings to proofreading and for the many weekends and evenings he did all of the cooking and the homework supervising so that I could write.