It has taken me somewhat by surprise to notice, just a moment ago, that I have started using my mother’s handcream. That’s an odd statement I know. But after years spent trying different pots, fussily discounting brand after brand, pooh-poohing other people’s recommendations, I had found my Holy Grail of handcreams. Without it I am lost. My hands feel rubbish, and that makes me a bit tetchy.

I consider it such an essential that when my mum was dying my husband bought me a little emergency tube to put in my handbag for days when I needed a pick-me-up as I sat by her bedside.

When I occasionally used Mum’s handcream at her house I always thought it was sticky and a bit cheap, the old-fashioned label had, I don’t think, changed since I was a baby. If you try to rub it in too much it leaves bits on your hands. I have never been someone patient enough to let handcream dry on its own.

At £1.29 a pot it is perfectly good but most definitely not a luxury beauty product.

But Mum never showed any interest in trying other brands. She loved it so much that when she thought it had been discontinued our family started searching for it in every Boots we went near.

Between us we tracked down about six pots, three of which were the last three in stock in some town I was on a day trip to. I was thrilled – though felt a tad guilty that there might be someone else out there who only used Cremolia and didn’t have children looking for it in four different counties. Not guilty enough to leave one on the shelf for them though. Mum’s cupboard was replenished and we all rested easy again.

After some considerable time it came back in to stock, one wonders if it was by public demand, hoardes of rampaging old ladies complaining that the handcream that had been used by generations was no longer deemed worthy in a modern society.

And therein lies the rub – used by generations.

When Mum died and we came to clear out her house we got to the point where we were all tired and emotional.

But with so much to do we needed to press on. After a restorative cuppa, my sister and I chose the bathroom – an ‘easy hit’ we said, nothing sentimental in there, right? My sister started by taking down a laminated Mabel Lucie Attwell poster off the wall, a reprint of a poem Mum had loved when she was little and recited to me when I was a child. From behind it fell a note, handwritten by my Mum on a paper bag, saying the poster was for me because I liked it as much as she did.

An ‘easy hit’ this room was not. I remained relatively composed. Relatively being the key word.

So armed with a bin liner we opened the cupboard ready to scoop up moisturisers and tubes of squeezed-in-the-middle toothpaste. One of the first things my sister pulled out and lobbed in the bag was a jar of Cremolia, one of my mother’s own little secret stockpile should she ever be faced with production stopping again. I lost it. I don’t know why. It was just a jar of handcream. But I reached in the bag, fished it out, and scurried into my room.

That jar of Cremolia made me cry as much as pretty much anything we dealt with save for a few notes and her clothes. I had seen my mother unscrew the golden lid a hundred thousand times over almost 50 years, dabbing just one finger inside as the washing up water glugged down the plughole. It smelled like her hands, the ones that had dressed me when I was little, cuddled me, stroked my hair when I was having the ‘screaming habdabs’.

Now it’s sitting on my desk, with another waiting in the cupboard near the kitchen sink. And several times a day I absent-mindedly unscrew the lid and dab just one finger inside like she did. And I get it. Mum didn’t use that handcream because it was the best on the market. She didn’t use it because it was cheap and she had little money for luxury items. She used it because her mother had used it. And probably her mother’s mother before her.

So now my lovely L’Occitane with shea butter sits in my desk drawer, pulled out from time to time when I feel the need for something more nourishing than the gooey stuff that I can buy 14 pots of for the same price. But I have a feeling that the makers of Smith’s Cremolia didn’t lose one more customer when Mum died, they simply gained a new generation.