Maggie O’Farrell

that my family wasn't making this up.

And also, it was an amazing feeling to be touching a piece of paper that I knew he had touched at one point.

Yes, I mean, actually, in those days, they all had this incredible kind of slanting, very beautiful copperplate script.

I mean, I would love to say mine is as neat as that.

It's not.

But there is a weird, there was a weird similarity, certainly.

Mine's a lot messier, I have to say.

Yes.

So hanging in my parents' house, it was my uncle's who passed away and he left it to my dad.

And so hanging in our house is a map drawn by, in the book, he's called Tomas and his son is called Liam, who's based on my great grandfather.

And so he, his son had drawn a map, which is in the style of an OS map of an imaginary place.

And it's been hanging there for years and I've passed it hundreds of times back and forth.

And one day, a few years ago, I don't really know why, I decided to look at it with a magnifying glass.

And in the top corner of it is a little kind of medallion about the size of an old postage stamp.

And when you look at it through a magnifying glass, you can see that there's a portrait inside it of...

my great-great-grandfather.

And, I mean, it must have been done with a brush of maybe two or three bristles.

It's so tiny.

And he's standing behind a British soldier in a red coat and the soldier is looking through a theodolite.

And it was just astonishing because there he has been, hiding in plain sight all these years.