And then her father had died so suddenly. He and Meredith had always been very close; it had been he who told her she could do anything with her life, so often that she began to really believe it. Her mother, on the other hand, had been both difficult and distant, and seemed to find having a child faintly irritating. She clearly resented the closeness of father and daughter. Obviously Meredith was sorry when she died, but with nothing like the dreadful void that had opened up when her beloved father had a heart attack while Meredith was on the other side of the world. It had been sudden and unexpected, but everyone had said it was a merciful release, as he was beginning to decline in other ways. Even so, losing him had rocked Meredith’s well-ordered world. She had come home for the funeral, said her own personal goodbyes and gone back to work even more feverishly.

Yet something had changed. She found herself thinking all the time about the years when she and her father had been happiest together. He had always loved camping and his favourite place to do it had been south-west France, where people took camping really seriously. When Meredith was a child, he had found a campsite where the tents were fixed and even quite luxurious – with their own camping loos! It was right on the banks of the Savarin River and her father would take three whole days to drive the family there, being honked at by angry French motorists and overtaken on the inside on motorways, but staying at the speed he blithely thought appropriate. Then they would arrive and move in, having brought their special put-u-up beds and pillows, and Meredith would dash off and see if any of the usual children had arrived since it was the kind of place people came back to every year, often at the same time. To an only child, it was bliss, and it meant that Meredith learned to get on with lots of different nationalities – a skill that would become very useful in her adult life.

But the best moment of all was when she and her dad would walk along the banks of the river into the nearest village to buy the bread in the mornings. If they dawdled enough, this could mean a whole hour together, just the two of them. Dad would talk about all the possibilities ahead for his clever daughter, and how her dreams must never be limited by the realities of life, as his had been. He was saving, he told her, so that by the sixth form when the important exams loomed, she could go to a really good school where the teachers would do nothing but encourage her, unlike the local school she was at now.