From the time she was a little girl she knew she hadn’t been conceived in the same way as most of her friends – she was a “test-tube baby”, her parents told her.
Back then Esmeralda Swart didn’t really understand what this meant but when she was 18 her mother gave her all the details, explaining that she was conceived using sperm from an anonymous donor.
By that stage, the only father she’d ever known had died and this made her even more curious about her biological father.