I flew home to tell my daughter off for wasting the money I’d been sending for five years. I found her at school eating half a bread roll — and then the counsellor told me she’d been registered as a low-income student since the year I left.

Then she took a paper folder out of her desk drawer and put a hardship application in front of me.

Under household income it says: no regular financial contribution from father.

At the bottom of it is my mother’s signature.

There is a second page to that application and it is the one that finished me in that office.

It asks the applicant to describe the household circumstances, and there are about six lines for it, and my mother filled all six.

She wrote that the father was out of state and had not been in contact.

She wrote that there had been no support since the mother’s passing.

And she wrote one more sentence, which I am going to reproduce because it is the only place in five years where I can see the whole thing in her own hand.

The child is embarrassed about it and would prefer it not be discussed.