I fell in love with J within a few seconds of her stepping down from the Eastbourne train. It was a blind date and I had been waiting nervously at the Brighton ticket barrier. She seemed to have style and confidence as she looked around the platform. I could not take my eyes off her as she walked towards me, and when she spoke I felt I would never want anyone but her.

We walked down to a café to introduce ourselves. After marriage at 18 she had just divorced at 30. I too had divorced and was hanging on to my job as an accountant to keep a roof over my children’s heads. I didn’t say that I had grown up on a council estate and that all of my life I had longed for a middle-class girl like her.

Quickly, over the next few weeks, we fell passionately in love. We shared things that I had never done: cooking, reading aloud, doing The Times crosswords, drinking wine.

But after what was, for me, a year of bliss, J announced that she had to move on. She had got a job in Brussels. Of course, I had to stay with my children.

Occasionally J wrote but the letters were never more than friendly and distant.

Still, I kept on hoping that our passion would be rekindled, and comforted myself with the scraps J had left behind: a comb with strands of her hair, a worn pair of sandals, a wafer of soap and an address book from her schooldays.

It was an obsession that I could not give up. Over the years I told other women that J was the love of my life. Then, 15 years after our first meeting, came the news of J’s death from cancer.

There was no more hope for us, and to prove it to myself I threw away all of my mementoes. But not her address book. This contains details of J’s best friend from childhood, so perhaps I will find her — the last link that I shall ever have with her, one final thing to cling on to.

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