Saul Eslake

So once you opened that file, one of the first documents to come out was a newspaper article from the 1950s.

Tell me what was in that newspaper article.

So, Saul, you discovered that your birth mother had been married to Bill, who's listed on your birth certificate as your father.

They'd already had two kids before you.

Yes.

Then they'd separated acrimoniously.

She'd taken on a flat where there were BOAC, British Airways pilots, in the flat below who were often having, in her words, orgies, marvellous orgies downstairs.

And that's how it seems she had become pregnant with you.

So what clues did the article have about your mother, Margaret, becoming pregnant with you?

That's why it took a year.

Right.

So you were, as an infant, you were kind of torn in this awful acrimonious divorce.

Saul, you had grown up

suspecting that the reason it had taken so long for you to be adopted was because you were somehow unbecoming, you were short-sighted or something, or something was not appealing about you.

And now you find out the real reason is because you as a kind of a helpless infant was just simply being caught up in the nasty little hypocrisies of the 1950s.

How did that make you feel to realize that?

So while Margaret was entangled with the divorce proceedings, what did you discover had happened to your real father, Norman, the pilot?

Because I imagine that opening sentence is enormously important.

I was just thinking that was very kind of Mike.

Yeah, it was.