This collection started as a whisper, a quiet mouth asking questions. Over the years it became a coherent voice that kept getting louder. Now it is a song, sprung from a yearning to fill in the missing parts, to understand my mother’s story. Perhaps it’s something that goes beyond what is experiential and real and moves into the memory of imagination. Perhaps it is a book of magic, of synchronicity and colliding moments in time, too strange to be logical, too concise to be chance. Ultimately, it’s a way of shedding in order to change the direction of a past. Sometimes, I think it has been formed by my imagined daughter, clearing the way ahead before her own birth. Or by whole generations of women, celebrating a future, formed from the centre of us.