Many of my projects and publications have drawn on my 20 years with the BBC in Northern Ireland. I was a news journalist, reporter, presenter, producer and finally editor responsible for communicating some of the area’s darkest days to local, national and international audiences. Not surprising, then, that I have specialised in the areas of trauma, addiction and abuse, enabling those without a voice to finally have it heard. But every author is entitled to one fairytale ending. Mine was better than anything I could have dreamed up.

It began on a wet Sunday afternoon in Donegal when I came upon an overgrown grave. Agnes Jones, the founder of Irish Nursing, read the inscription. I’d never heard of her and, it transpired, neither had the locals. Self-effacing heroines are hard to research, especially when little contemporaneous material survives. It took persistence, and the odd stroke of luck. Mine came via Liverpool, where, I found, Nurse Jones of Fahan is a legend. A veritable saint. To this day, she is remembered as the “Lady in the Staircase Window” whose candlelit tread up and down the workhouse stairs illuminated the spirit of the thousands she cared for.

I wrote a play became a film script which was produced on a minimal budget over the one frantic, sunny week that summer. The resulting documentary drama was optioned by television. It featured in medical conferences, at film festivals, travelling to Liverpool; and the USA. I wrote a short biography that was distributed to every second level school in the country.

But the real fairytale was yet to come. Agnes Jones died single; her sister, widowed young, was childless. Her brother had disappeared to the Antipodes. The family line, all the research suggested, had died out. A few days before our premiere, working into the silly hours, I received an email from a Mr Jones of New Zealand. Was I the Felicity McCall who was researching Agnes Jones? We needed to talk to each other.

Friends dismissed it as a joke. This avowed cynic replied. We talked and within hours I had the final piece of the jigsaw- and so had he. Agnes’ brother had finally settled down in New Zealand, and had a family late in life, but had lost contact with Ireland. Peter Jones was of the third generation who’d been trying to piece together what little they knew about their ancestor who, legend had it, had been a famous Irish nurse. How lovely if you could come to the premiere, I wistfully said. His job gave him inexpensive flights. He landed just in time and was guest of honour. Links are maintained to this day. The play has toured Australasia, the documentary has been screened there. Plus I got to write my first- and last- fairytale ending.