Review: Your daddy was a donor: As a child, Melissa always felt there was something not quite right. At 32, she found out that she was conceived through donor insemination. Now she wants to find her real father - and she's not the only one

THE DIRTY family secret. There never seemed a time when it was not there. Even as a child, Christine Whipp, now a 46-year-old grandmother, says she was aware that somehow life was not as it pretended to be. She was just eight when she experienced her first epiphany about her miserable sense of dislocation.

'I remember sitting in the classroom and the teacher was turning round the globe,' she says. 'A boy asked where we would end up if we dug a tunnel from England to the other side, and the teacher said Australia. That was when I realised. I knew that I ought to be somewhere else, with other people. The stork must have left me in the wrong place.'

Many children feel this way, but in Christine's case there was a reason. It was the early Sixties. Christine, an only child, was living with her widowed mother in Devon. Her carpenter father had been an insulin-dependent diabetic who went blind when Christine was three and died when she was six. Christine and her mother, who worked in a factory, never got on.

Ten years ago, Christine's mother referred to the secret directly for the first time, lobbing an incendiary device into a perpetual mother-daughter war. She didn't say what it was, but offered to leave a letter, giving details, when she died. Christine pestered. She suspected her mother had been raped. She says she was not the type to have an affair. Then, five years ago, the two women struck a bargain. Her mother would confess all on condition that her daughter clear off and not bother her again. When the bombshell was dropped, the bargain was easily kept. Christine and her mother, who died six months ago, never spoke again.

'She told me, in a letter, that I had been conceived through donor insemination (DI) at the Margaret Jackson clinic in Exeter,' says Christine. 'I was 40 when I found out that my father was a glass jar with a blob of sperm in it. My father doesn't have a face, or a name and he wasn't even a one-night stand. If my mum had had an affair at least there would have been sex and lust, something human rather than...