It was with a heavy heart that Jane Jackson sold the wooden armchair her mother had crafted from scratch during the Second World War after she passed away in 2000.

So, when the old battered piece of furniture turned up this month at The Barn, where Mrs Jackson has volunteered for more than 40 years, she could not believe her luck.

There was only one thing to do: reunite the fading family heirloom with the rest of her own furniture.

“It was like my mother had come back for a split second,” Mrs Jackson said. “It was a total surprise and I could not believe it had turned up again after so many years had passed.”

As a child, Mrs Jackson had fond memories of her mother, Jean Wadson, reading stories to her sat in the armchair in the drawing room of the family home in Hamilton.

“We used to live in a house called Little Cote, which is where the Leopard’s Club is now, in Hamilton,” the 73-year-old said.

“We were there until I was 7 and I can still remember her sitting there in her armchair reading stories to me in the evening.

“It was only a chair, but it had been with me all my life. What was even more important, though, is that she had made it herself.”

Mrs Wadson died in 2000 at the age of 93 and Ms Jackson was forced to sell much of her mother’s furniture because she did not have the space to keep it in her Paget home.

“I had a big house sale and I remember someone buying the chair as well as a loveseat that belonged to my mother,” she said.

“It was a difficult decision, but I was trying to be practical at the time. In the months and years since, I have often wondered what became of it and whether it had been left outside in a garden or some family was using it in the same way my mother did.”

Mrs Jackson recently arrived at The Barn on a Monday morning to discover that not just her mother’s old armchair had been dropped off, but also the loveseat that it had been sold with.

“That was what nailed it,” she said. “It certainly looked the same, but was not in the greatest condition. But the fact that it had come back with the same loveseat it had been sold with proved to me it was the same piece of furniture.

“I now plan to restore it to how it looked before and keep it in the family.

“I am so pleased to have it back after all this time.”