and she has done my grandmother’s work since 1998 and she wears a cardigan to a meeting and misses nothing.
She did not arrive with a speech. She arrived with the folder and a Victoria sponge, which she had made, and which we ate.
And she went through it the way she goes through everything — in order, slowly, with a pencil — and at the end of it she said one thing that I wrote down that evening.
“Noor. You are going to want to do something with this immediately, and you are seven months pregnant.”
“So here is my advice and you are free to ignore it. Do nothing with it until you have had the baby. Nothing at all. Because whatever you do now, you’ll do it frightened, and everything you do frightened is a thing they can use.”
And I said: what if they move it all in
